November 17, 2006

Stoppard's Revolutionary Thinking

By JULIA M. KLEIN

Tom Stoppard's calling card as a playwright has always been his linguistic and philosophical virtuosity. Though he doesn't tout himself as a theatrical innovator, he has adeptly burlesqued dramatic conventions and reinterpreted much of the British theatrical canon. His first great succès d'estime is a prime example. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Stoppard thrust two minor, doomed characters from Hamlet into the existential angst of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,