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Theatre

Wittgenstein: Stoppard’s Muse

Fergus Edwards finds Wittgenstein everywhere in Tom Stoppard’s plays, from Jumpers to Leopoldstadt.

Sir Tom Stoppard (b.1937), full-time playwright, no-time university student, discovered philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work in July 1968. He wrote to his old flatmate that, rather than writing his next play, he was “following Wittgenstein through [the] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.” We know that he kept reading, because three years later his play Dogg’s Our Pet (1971) began with a deliveryman walking onto the stage and calling out for a ‘Block!’ and a ‘Slab!’ The whole scene is lifted directly from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953). Even when Stoppard developed the material into a longer, more political play, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979), he kept all the original Wittgensteinian references.

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