That self-referential art and self-indulgent revolution grow from the same soil is a proposition with which Tom Stoppard is familiar, and there are few modern playwrights who could bring a more formidable intelligence to bear on it. Stoppard's own plays—which are, almost all of them, plays within plays—grow from the demand that Art should be its own subject. At the same time politics provides their occasion, and no politics fascinates Stoppard more than that which has issued from the revolutionary consciousness.

In Travesties (1975), he exploited the accidental, or not-so-accidental, coincidence in Zurich of Tristan Tzara (the arch proponent of the Absolute in Art) and Lenin (the arch political absolutist). With them also is James Joyce, and much of the play—a clever collage made from Oscar Wilde's Earnest, the Ithaca chapter in Ulysses, Lenin's letters and speeches, and Tzara's boyish nonsense—is devoted to the contrast...