Illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King


	Stoppard also makes frequent use of fantasy in his plays, placing real historical figures in fantastic situations. For instance, his play Travesties speculates on what kind of conversation might have resulted from the unlikely meeting of Lenin, James Joyce, and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1916 (all three men did visit the city in that year, but there’s no evidence of a meeting between them). His most recent play The Invention of Love depicts the afterlife of poet/literary critic A. E. Housman, opening with Housman in the Underworld, waiting to be ferried across the river Styx. The fantasy setting allows a retrospective of Housman’s private life and public career that raises questions about the intersections between life and literature and how literature can sometimes express real emotions that are repressed in daily existence.
	As the previous example illustrates, Stoppard’s works often concern “the indistinct frontier between Life and Art” (The Norton Anthology, p. 2786). What is reality, and what is artifice? Stoppard’s approach to these themes reflects the postmodern notion of an indefinable, amorphous reality. In blurring the lines between real life and the stage in his mystery parody The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard implies that the clear solutions and neatly resolved endings of traditional mysteries are no longer viable in postmodern reality.
	The stage is one of his recurring metaphors for expressing the tenuous nature of reality in the postmodern world and the infinite possibilities for experience that such a world offers. When there are no fixed truths and no set reality, one can play any variety of roles, scripting any number of future realities for oneself. Stoppard’s plays dramatize both the fear and exciting hope resulting from this existential situation.