An Investigation of Stoppard's "Hound" and "Foot"

Abstract

IT IS the parodic and satirically self-referential quality of Tom Stoppard's plays that sets him apart from the Juvenalian playwrights of the fifties. Whereas Osborne uses anger as a means of attack upon the world, Stoppard remains the theatrical critic and aims his derision at the mores of drama, and especially at the age-old detective figure of Sophocles' Oedipus. Turning the tradition against itself is the main thrust of his aesthetic attack. Using the modern preoccupation with absurdity and Angst, he strikes home at such figures as T.S. Eliot and his "overwhelming question," which is not to be asked, which one dare not ask, for perhaps there is no answer or only such an answer as it would be better not to know. Stoppard makes game of these notions by the old theatrical trick of inverting them. Throughout his plays the serious forms of the dramatized detective story are reduced to cartoon-like scenes which humorously strip away the conventions on which they are founded. Even the highly visual comic effects appear to mock both blind justice and the Oedipus myth.