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In cataloguing the decades of unease and instability inaugurated by the late-I950s English theatrical scene, C. W. E. Bigsby notes that such anxiety often found its expression in 'ontological and epistemological questions' posed by writers such as Tom Stoppard. Stoppard in particular had to negotiate a sense of dislocation in which 'the social order, character, language, are all shown in a state of disrepair'.l What we witness, in Bigsby's estimation, is 'the role-playing of individuals cut adrift from the history they had assumed to be the origin of their private significance' (p. 394). The construction of plays would go on, but no longer propped up by the sturdy scaffolding provided by social, political, and artistic institutions and traditions. Whatever play the artist envisioned would be enacted amid 'the collapse of formal structures of meaning' (p. 403). |