![]() ![]() Later mixing historical and fictitious characters he still made riotously free with the English canon, from Hamlet to Agatha Christie. With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), first seen on the Edinburgh fringe, he became the youngest playwright to be staged by the National, and spawned a sub-genre of bit-players placed centre-stage. In a 45-year career spanning stage, screen and radio, he is credited with bringing ideas back into British theatre. If Chekhov has long been a puzzle, so, in a sense, has Stoppard. Chekhov "liked laughter through unshed tears". "It suddenly became perfectly clear to me," he says, "that you could answer with another question: 'Is life?' So it stops being a puzzle." In Chekhov, as in life, a "production with no laughs" would hardly be to Stoppard's taste. T om Stoppard believes he has cracked the old chestnut of whether Chekhov's plays are comedies. ![]()
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