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Abstract: This paper examines the defining dramaturgical strategies that shape Tom Stoppard’s postmodern theatrical practice, tracing their formal, philosophical, and aesthetic development from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) through Arcadia (1993) and The Invention of Love (1997). Challenging the persistent critical tendency to reduce Stoppard’s achievement to its most visible surface – intertextual wit, verbal ingenuity, and affinities with the Theatre of the Absurd – the study advances a systemic reconstruction of his dramaturgy as a coherent philosophical-poetic model. This model is grounded in the interaction of five interrelated principles: exuberance of invention, parody as structural critique, semiotics of unstable language, theatrical spectacle as an ontological medium, and staging of ideological and philosophical collision. These principles are first articulated in their theoretical interdependence and then examined in concentrated form through a close reading of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a paradigmatic instance of postmodern drama. The analysis demonstrates that Stoppard’s intertextual reconfiguration of Hamlet does not merely reinterpret a canonical text but enacts, at the level of dramaturgical structure, the epistemological uncertainty and ontological instability that define his broader poetics. Particular attention is devoted to the representation of death as simultaneously a metaphysical problem, a theatrical construct, and a site of ontological absence. In this context, the play is situated at the intersection of Samuel Beckett’s absurdism, Martin Heidegger’s concept of Being-toward-death, and Jacques Derrida’s notion of aporia. The paper concludes that Stoppard’s dramaturgy emerges as a distinctive aesthetic project that affirms theatre as a privileged mode of philosophical inquiry into the human condition, while simultaneously exposing the irreducible contingency of meaning, identity, and human existence.

About the author(s) :

Radoje V. Šoškić

University of Priština in Kosovska Mitrovica (Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7690-2145

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 17.03.2026; date of publication: 30.06.2026

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