Tom Stoppard: European Phantom Pain and the Theatre of Faux Biography

The paper reads Stoppard’s work in the 21st century as further testimony of the gradual politicisation of his work that began in the 1970s under the influence of Czech dissidents, and particularly as a result of his visits to Russia and Prague in 1977. It also provides evidence that Stoppard, since the 1990s, had begun to target emotional responses from his audience to redress the intellectual cool that seems to have shaped his earlier, “absurdist” phase. This turn towards emotionalism, the increasingly elegiac obsession with doubles, unrequited lives, and memory are linked to a set of biographical turning points: the death of his mother and the investigation into his Czech-Jewish family roots, which laid bare the foundations of the Stoppardian art. Examining this kind of “phantom pain” in two of his 21st-century plays, Rock’n’Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2019), the essay argues that Stoppard’s work in the 21st century was increasingly coloured by his biography and Jewishness—bringing to the fore an important engagement with European history that helped Stoppard become aware of some blind spots in his attitudes towards Englishness.

Traducción y traslado: aquellas otras palabras en el teatro de Stoppard

El uso de la expresión “sistema de representación” asume una variedad de posibilidades que se proyectan, incluso, fuera del plano de la palabra. De este modo se irá construyendo un entrecruzamiento de representaciones y de ecos que van dando forma a una puesta en escena y que necesita de la observación del espectador / lector para establecer dichos vínculos. En esta oportunidad nos centraremos en dos obras breves de Tom Stoppard para ver cómo pone en escena diferentes conflictos enfocados en el problema del lenguaje, de la traducción y de la representación. "Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth" son dos piezas donde el tema de la referencia en el uso particular del lenguaje lleva a establecer un hiato entre la acción, la palabra y el espectador. Stoppard siempre estuvo interesado por los problemas surgidos por los “juegos de lenguaje” derivados de su lectura de "Investigaciones Filosóficas" de Ludwig Wittgenstein encontró en estas piezas breves una forma de representar sobre el escenario una teoría particular acerca de la palabra y de las posibilidades de comunicación.

Tom Stoppard’s Science Plays: Metaphor and Experiment

The science play is a well-established genre of dramatic writing in the Englishspeaking theatrical tradition. This paper discusses three full-length science plays by the prominent British playwright Tom Stoppard. These are Hapgood, Arcadia, and The Hard Problem. The plays are based on popular science sources and offer their audience an access to science. After providing a brief history of the science play and the science show, the paper shows that Stoppard develops the dramatic and theatrical traditions by involving science on the textual (giving popularised scientific knowledge in the form of dialogised lectures) and performative levels (demonstrating or illustrating science on stage), primarily to turn it into a metaphor of human behaviour. Hapgood and Arcadia further engage with science on the structural level, thus becoming thought experiments reflecting upon science. The most recent play, The Hard Problem, develops textual and performative strategies related to science but ceases to experiment with the form, leaving more space for the audience to draw ethical conclusions.

British Jewish Writing in the Post-2016 Era: Tom Stoppard, Linda Grant and Howard Jacobson

This article analyses the ways in which British Jewish writing has responded to the watershed events of 2016: the vote to leave the EU in the United Kingdom, and the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA. It argues that such a response demands varied generic and narrative forms, as exemplified in three case studies. Tom Stoppard’s 2020 play Leopoldstadt is a historical drama about twentieth-century Austrian history, but the moment of its staging and its links to the playwright’s biography convey its cautionary relationship to the present. Linda Grant’s 2019 novel A Stranger City is set in a post-2016 London that has become unfamiliar to its inhabitants, while Howard Jacobson’s Pussy of 2017 is a satire aimed at Trump’s electoral success. In each case, cultural turmoil is represented in terms of Jewish history.