Few playwrights thought as hard—or as painfully, playfully—as Tom Stoppard about what keeps human beings going when all the old, reasonable reasons have collapsed. Stoppard, who saw the future in the past, returned repeatedly to three questions. If the universe is meaningless and god was always dead, why does anything matter? If history is a bloody farce, why bother being decent? And if consciousness or love is just chemistry, why do they feel so real?
His play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) begins with two bewildered minor characters from Hamlet waiting for a purpose that never comes. Probability collapses, coins land heads forever, and still they talk, still they try to make sense of the plot they dimly feel they inhabit. Their identical fate—death off-stage—was written by Shakespeare, but Stoppard gives them an inner life, and that life is unmistakably Kafkaesque. The conversation is the meaning: the heroic, doomed process of puzzling things out and carrying on.
In Arcadia (1993), Stoppard collapses all three of his obsessions into one helpless, gutting stage picture. The play alternates between two eras in the same English country house.
1809-1812: Thomasina Coverly, 13 at the start and 17 by the end, is tutored by young scholar Septimus Hodge. While adults date, duel, and gossip, she quietly invents—centuries early—the mathematics of chaos theory. She grasps that the second law of thermodynamics dooms the universe to “heat death”, a final state of disorder where nothing can ever happen again. The night before her 17th birthday, Thomasina dies in a fire. A little too symbolic. But there it is.
Cut to the 1990s. A literary historian, Hannah Jarvis, and a cocky academic, Bernard Nightingale, try to reconstruct what happened in that house two centuries earlier. They find Thomasina’s exercise books, but most clues have been lost or misread. Time, like heat, flows only one way.
Everything leads to the final three minutes. The lights do not change; the same table, the same chairs, the same room. But suddenly, both eras occupy the stage at once.
On one side: Thomasina, in a Regency dress, asks Septimus to teach her to waltz before the party ends. They dance to a faint music drifting in from the next room. On the other side: Hannah, in modern clothes, is handed an old cassette by Gus, the nearly-silent teenage boy of the house. He presses play. The same waltz begins again, now scratchy and recorded. Gus offers his hand; Hannah, who has spent the play guarding her emotions, accepts.
Two couples, 200 years apart, move to the same music in the same physical space, unaware of each other. The audience sees both at once. The equations Thomasina scribbled are correct: everything—stars, civilisations, love affairs, teenage geniuses—will dissolve into cold, featureless silence. Thomasina is already dead; Hannah will die soon enough. Even the waltz is a borrowed energy that will dissipate with the music.
And yet for those 30 seconds, the dance actually happens. A dead girl and a living woman turn to the same music, filling the same span of time. In classic Stoppard fashion, the only real thing is the sad beauty of transience. The puzzle has been solved. The pain and beauty persist. Stoppard’s fascination with love and consciousness unravels.
The Coast of Utopia (2002), his nine-hour chronicle of Russian revolutionaries, is a laboratory for his second question: if history is mostly cruelty and error, why choose decency? Herzen watches every noble idea curdle into terror and still ends with the exhausted, defiant line: “The future is disorder… but we have to want it anyway.” Wanting decency, truth, and love when every empirical test says they are pointless—that was Stoppard’s moral position.
Born Tomáš Sträussler, Stoppard fled the Nazis as a child, grew rich and famous in the democratic West, and never let himself off the hook. Science had killed the old gods; history had killed the new ones. What remained was the naked human animal, stripped of guarantees, still capable of courage, curiosity, perhaps kindness. All his life, he wondered what it was to be human.
That stance feels painfully relevant in 2025. We live in the absurd existential world Stoppard helped to map: algorithmic feeds instead of god, climate models instead of divine wrath, all announcing the same verdict—you are a speck, your feelings are epiphenomena, your species is a rounding error. The loudest contemporary responses are either fundamentalist retreat or ironic shrug. Stoppard offered a third option: look straight at the emptiness and choose to care anyway. Not because it pays, not because it’s adaptive, but because the alternative is neither philosophically nor aesthetically appealing.
In this sense his plays are not consolations but rehearsals: tragicomic models of how to think, talk, and even joke our way through a universe that will not explain itself. He showed that the dance matters because it is brief; the conversation matters because it is futile; decency matters because the world is unfair. Stoppard’s work insists that meaning is not discovered but made, in real time, by fragile, temporary creatures who are acutely conscious that they are temporary.
The waltz will end, the lights will go out, and the stage will be empty. But while the music plays, we might as well dance, solemnly celebrate, as perhaps in one’s own constant funeral, the poetry of transience.
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)
