Stoppard is a modern playwright who uses the comparisons of characters from the past and the present to comment on the superficiality of modern people. At the outset, these three plays, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, and Arcadia, could not seem more different. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a play full of low comedy and jokes concerning differing opinions on death. The characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are so similar that neither the on stage characters nor the audience can really tell them apart. Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves can not tell who is who. They are Stoppard’s bumbling modern idiots who fail to see order in the chaos. The remainder of the low comedy of this play comes from interactions with the Lead Player. Unlike Guildenstern, he views death as a vital part of the play, not as the finalistic end of everything. Stoppard is showing the audience the two extremes of modern society, those who, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, completely accept chaos and are willing to throw everything else out the window, and those who, like the Player, are in denial of the existence of chaos. Neither decides to deal with the chaos. Those who completely accepted it became bumbling idiots and those who denied it were living is a fantasy world that was very apparent to the audience.
In Travesties, Stoppard uses the character relationships to create a comparison between people of action and the ordinary people, such as Henry Carr. This time, Stoppard comments that society seems to be on the right track in dealing with the idea that we exist in chaos. Once again, he shows an extreme. Tristan Tzara is an intellectual who has totally accepted chaos and has even made chaos his art form. Through his overdone caricature of Tzara, Stoppard shows that, while Tzara is a very famous and influential person, his ideas were a little off target. Stoppard does the same with his caricatures of Joyce and Lenin, showing that both of these men try to deal with the chaos that they know they live in and try to set examples through creating order out of the chaos. The societal mirror comes into this play in the character of Henry Carr. He wants so desperately to be famous and fails. He finally adapts the modern attitude of doing nothing, the exact attitude that Stoppard criticizes in all of his works. The audience gets the impression that Carr never makes anything of himself because he does not even attempt to deal with the chaos, in one way or another.
In Arcadia, Stoppard created the illusion of two separate plays combined into one. By doing this, he was able to create clear differences in attitude between the 1809 cast and the present day cast. In this way he was able to hold up his societal mirror to the audience in two different ways. First, in the differences between the 1809 cast and the modern-day cast and second through the ways in which the characters of the modern-day cast epitomized modern attitudes. The prime examples of this are the differences between Thomasina and Valentine and the ways in which Valentine’s lack of patience and his willingness to give up on trying to find the patterns in the chaos of nature reflects society’s inability to deal with chaos.
Bibliography:
Stoppard, Tom., Arcadia, New York, Samuel French, Inc.,1993.
Stoppard, Tom., Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, New York, Samuel French, Inc., 1967.
Stoppard, Tom., Travesties, New York, Grove Press, 1975.