STAGE EMPTY, THE MUSIC PLAYS ON

EW playwrights thought as hard—or as painfully, playfully—as Tom Stoppard about what keeps human beings going when all the old, reasonable reasons have collapsed.

- CP SURENDRAN

Stoppard, who saw the future in the past, returned repeatedly to three questions. If the universe is meaningless and god was always dead, why does anything matter? If history is a bloody farce, why bother being decent? And if consciousness or love is just chemistry, why do they feel so real?

His play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) begins with two bewildered minor characters from Hamlet waiting for a purpose that never comes. Probability collapses, coins land heads forever, and still they talk, still they try to make sense of the plot they dimly feel they inhabit. Their identical fate—death offstage—was written by Shakespeare, but Stoppard gives them an inner life, and that life is unmistakably Kafkaesque. The conversation is the meaning: the heroic, doomed process of puzzling things out and carrying on.

In Arcadia (1993), Stoppard collapses all three of his obsessions into one helpless, gutting stage picture. The play alternates between two eras in the same English country house.

1809-1812: Thomasina Coverly, 13 at the start and 17 by the end, is tutored by young scholar Septimus Hodge. While adults date, duel, and gossip, she quietly invents—centuries early—the mathematics of chaos theory. She grasps that the second law of thermodynamics dooms the universe to “heat death”, a final state of disorder where nothing can ever happen again. The night before her 17th birthday, Thomasina dies in a fire. A little too symbolic. But there it is.