Along with Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard is probably the most important playwright on the contemporary British scene. His plays, like those of Pinter, are informed with a tragicomic sense of the absurd and the contingent nature of man's existence. A frequently recurring character in Stoppard's plays is the marginal man, the character standing on the fringe of the central action, tentatively placing first one foot and then the other into the arena of activity…. Man's confrontation with his world is a recurring theme in Stoppard's plays. Whether rendered in the form of two minor characters from a Shakespearean play assuming heroic status (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), a professor of moral philosophy discoursing on God while his exshowgirl wife plays surrealistic games (Jumpers, 1972), or a pseudohistorical meeting in a Zurich library of three radically different revolutionaries, Lenin, Joyce, and Tristan Tzara (Travesties, 1974), the theme of man's relationship to...