Tom Stoppard's playwrighting career may be said to parallel the progress of twentieth-century theater. His first play, Enter a Free Man, is a realistic comedy-drama. He then moves into the world of absurdity, which is dramatized in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in his fiction, and in several shorter plays. Yet at the same time, he extends the limits of absurdity by dramatizing the outside world concretely, as a part of a recognizable social system. And in his latest plays he creates characters who are not resigned to absurdity but are determined to battle against such a vision of the world—first through philosophical argument in Jumpers, and then through artistic and political revolution in Artist Descending a Staircase, Travesties, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and Professional Foul. (p. 153)

In most of Tom Stoppard's plays his characters are struggling, not surrendering. They are aware of absurdity, yet they...