On several occasions, Stoppard shares a story about an outdoor production of Shakespeare’s Tempest set in a garden before a small lake. When it came for Ariel to make an exit, the sprite, by miracle of theatre, flitted across the lake’s surface, making the lightest of splashes until out of sight. The completely forgettable stage direction “Exit Ariel” became a truly magical happening thanks to the theatrical ingenuity of constructing a small walkway just inches under the lake’s surface. Stoppard retells this story with some frequency to draw the distinction between “drama” and “theatre” and to emphasize that he is forever aware of the fact that the drama he writes is a text meant to be staged as “theatre.”

What we get from Stoppard are opportunities for events much like Ariel magically flitting over enchanted waters. The fact that Stoppard’s plays are so entertainingly playful and engagingly witty has frequently left critics wondering whether Stoppard is or should be considered a serious playwright. John Gardner captures this concern in his 1978 work, On Moral Fiction: “the tone, the ultra-theatrical pizzazz, the delightfully flashy language which is Stoppard’s special gift – all these warn us in advance that the treatment of ideas is likely to be more fashionable than earnest-predictable talk about the meaninglessness of things, the impossibility of ‘knowing,’ and so on.” Gardner is correct in seeing Stoppard swimming against the current of contemporary “serious” theatre in that Stoppard does avoid “earnest-predictable” visions of contemporary life. And as Gardner implies, Stoppard’s “pizzazz” may make him appear to be little more than an urbane upper-middle-class wit determined to curry the favor of the well-to-do with his cocktail-party philosophies.