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Many critics denounce that Tom Stoppard has borrowed plots, dialogues, dramatic actions, characters, and dramatic devices from other writers’ works. In addition, they dismiss his writing style as a mere imitation and look over the intrinsic qualities in his style: what he wants to achieve through this writing style, and how his writing style contributes to develop his view of theatre. However, he did not merely imitate them, but creatively reconstituted them, put them into new contexts, and gave them new meanings. The purpose of this paper is to investigate diverse aspects of creative transformations in The Real Thing, which consists of a variety of ‘plays within a play.’ In The Real Thing, like his other works, Stoppard transformed the existing works to achieve his dramatic purpose. Namely, he explored the content and ideas rather than the forms of the plays, which he had set as his main goal in writing his plays. He believed that adapting other writers’ works as his dramatic elements was much more economical and effective than originally writing plays on his own. Also, he thought that his writing style was the most effective way of expressing theatre’s artificiality and self-reflective aspects. Stoppard’s plays are not merely parasitic imitations or mimicries; rather, they are considerably meaningful in that they are creatively transformed and recreated as new types of works. Ultimately, through his unique writing style, Stoppard demonstrates that excellent plays can be created not only by use of the playwright’s imagination, but also through creative transformations.

In Travesties, Tom Stoppard mixes realities with fictions, and repeatedly questions the true nature of reality. But, he doesn’t give any answers or clues for it. In the ending, there is no resolution to the conflicts which can be generally expected. Instead, new conflicts are brought forth, and readers/spectators become more and more confused. In short, Travesties well embodies ‘disorder’ or ‘uncertainty,’ one of the most prominent aspects in his works. In Travesties, a variety of texts are piled one on another, multifarious dramatic devices are mixed together, and new fictional realities are created. In addition, these multi-layered realities exist as the outward appearances regulated by settled pattern. Sometimes, because of the unreliability of the protagonist, Carr’s memory, identical words and phrases are reiterated, and ‘time-slips’ occur repeatedly, but, Stoppard creates new order and meaning from disorder. In Travesties, he provides the disorderly scattered fragments with extremely different contexts, and creates new realities and meanings, which is the central point of the work. In Travesties, dramatic actions are developed not according to the relation of cause and effect but to Carr’s unreliable memory, which illustrates that human lives are not logical, and that human histories are not exact. In short, Stoppard demonstrates that we, humans, aren’t directly related to the historical affairs which actually happened, but fettered to a kind of fictional history temporarily reconstructed based on the necessity of the present, and therefore we should lead a more active, creative life.