Tom Stoppard Conference – 28-29 January 2027 – Sorbonne Université

Co-organisers: EMMA (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry) and VALE (Sorbonne Université)

Sixty years after the premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at London’s Old Vic Theatre (1967), and just over a year after the death of Sir Tom Stoppard on 29 November 2025, this international conference seeks to pay tribute to one of the playwrights who most profoundly shaped British theatre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to Leopoldstadt, which was staged in the West End in 2020 before transferring to Broadway, Stoppard’s work has displayed remarkable vitality. His theatre is characterised by constant reinvention, as evidenced by such diverse works as The Real Inspector Hound (1968), a parody of the detective genre; Jumpers (1972), a philosophical farce; Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979), with its Wittgensteinian language games; Arcadia (1993), which combines scientific inquiry with detective fiction; and the epic trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), to name but a few examples.

This conference will offer a retrospective overview of Stoppard’s work and the major themes that run through it, while also examining its place within the landscape of contemporary British theatre over recent decades. Was Stoppard’s theatre aligned with—or at odds with—movements such as new writing and postdramatic theatre, which place innovation, radicalism, and formal experimentation at the heart of their practice? Although Stoppard’s oeuvre is now widely recognised as one of the major achievements of contemporary British theatre, it nevertheless occupies a distinctive, and at times marginal, position in the recent history of the British stage.

The conference will also consider recent productions of Stoppard’s plays, as well as his work as a screenwriter.

Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Stoppard’s place within contemporary British theatre and the status of the well-made play today.
• His most recent plays and revivals of his earlier works.
• His legacy among twenty-first-century playwrights.
• The autobiographical dimension of his work.
• The role of philosophy and science in his writing.
• The place of the text within Stoppard’s theatrical aesthetics.
• Laughing with Stoppard.
• The ethical, political (or apolitical), and ideological dimensions of his theatre.
• Which venues and which audiences?
• The Englishness of his work, and issues of translation and performance in languages other than English.
• Stoppard’s work as a screenwriter.

Proposals in English or French (300–500 words), accompanied by a short biographical and bibliographical note, should be sent by 30 September 2026 to Elisabeth Angel-Perez (elisabeth.angel-perez@sorbonne-universite.fr ), Marianne Drugeon (marianne.drugeon@umpv.fr ) and Aloysia Rousseau (aloysia.rousseau@gmail.com ).