“LIFE IS BETTER THAN DEATH” “LOVE IS BETTER THAN HATE” A STUDY OF THREE SURREALIST PLAYS BY TOM STOPPARD

Tom Stoppard is a leading figure in contemporary British drama. Since he began writing in the early 1960s, he makes use of various literary movements and trends that were dominant in the first half of twentieth century, both thematically and technically. Some of the plays he wrote in the 1970s; namely, After Magritte, Jumpers and Artist Descending a Staircase, show his deep admiration and diligent employment of the tenets of the surrealist movement. Of special importance to Stoppard was the movement’s call for a revolt against all restraints on free creativity and its insistence on freeing man’s mind before freeing him socially or politically. The expressed aims of this paper are first to shed light on the points of similarities between Stoppard and the surrealists; and second, to try to show to what extent Stoppard succeeds in employing the ideas advocated by the surrealists in his plays.