Abstract—To maintain a healthy balanced loyalty, whether to art or society, posits a debatable issue. The artist is always on the look out for the potential tension between those two realms. Therefore, one of the most painful dilemmas the artist finds is how to function in a society without sacrificing the aesthetic values of his/her work. In other words, the life-long awareness of failure which derives from the concept of the artist as caught between unflattering social realities and the need to invent genuine art forms becomes a fertilizing soil for the artists to be tackled. Thus, within the framework of this dilemma, the question of the responsibility of the artist and the relationship of the art to politics will be illuminating. To a larger extent, however, in drama, this dilemma is represented by the fictional characters of the play. The present paper tackles the idea of the amorality of the artist in selected plays by Tom Stoppard. However, Stoppard’s awareness of his situation as a refugee has led him to keep at a distance from politics. He tried hard to avoid any intervention into the realms of political debate, especially in his earliest work. On the one hand, it is not meant that he did not interest in politics as such, but rather he preferred to question it than to create a fixed ideological position. On the other hand, Stoppard’s refusal to intervene in politics is ascribed to his feeling of gratitude to Britain where he settled. As a result, Stoppard has frequently been criticized for a lack of political engagement and also for not leaning too much for the left when he does engage. His reaction to these public criticisms finds expression in his self-conscious statements which defensively stressed the artifice of his work. He, like Oscar Wilde thinks that the responsibility of the artist is devoted to the realm of his/her art. Consequently, his consciousness for the role of the artist is truly reflected in his two plays, Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) and Travesties (1974). Keywords—Amorality, responsibility, politics, ideology. I. INTRODUCTION LTHOUGH the dilemma of the artist may refer to the personal questions that the actual playwright poses him/herself, it is focused on the dilemma of fictional characters. Having artists, as an integral part of the drama on stage involves “far more than simply thematic considerations” [1]. The representation of the artist-protagonist on stage can contribute to the question of self-reflexivity in art. In her article, “Visual Art and Artist in Contemporary Irish Drama,” Csilla Bertha, an editor and translator states that “in the majority of works focusing on artists, the interrelations between art and life, artist and reality, an artist’s human and artistic fulfilment traditionally form binary oppositions.”[1, p. 347] This means that lacking wholeness and harmony with his/her environment, the artist finds him/herself alone against reality. As a result, he/she feels the chasm between his/her desires and the demands of real life. Herbert Marcuse argues Majeed Mohammed Midhin is with the University of Essex, United Kingdom (e-mail: al_aubaidymajeed@yahoo.com). that “as soon as the artist demands individual fulfilment in his/her environment, s/he immediately experiences the curse of a culture, in which the ideal and reality, subject and object form sharp contrasts.”[1, p. 347] In such a situation, the artist finds himself/herself obliged to accept this pressing duality out of his responsibility to society albeit it is against his/her desires. Accordingly, the source of the artist’s dilemma comes from confronting the inevitable tension between the moral responsibility to real life and the aestheticism of the literary work. This dialectical relationship forms part of Stoppard’s pronouncements on art as we shall see later. Undoubtedly, Tom Stoppard was a unique voice in the context of the British theatre of the sixties and seventies. And now his plays gain significant recognition, especially when the “fringe” and “alternative” movements in Britain came to prominence. [2] Tim Brassell rightly states in his book, Tom Stoppard: An Assessment that “Tom Stoppard is unquestionably a major power in the contemporary theatre both in this country [Britain] and, increasingly, in America.” [3] After his breakthrough success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), the door was widely opened for him to be a prominent figure in the world of theatre. Similarly, in a homage and highly praised attribute given to him, a “Newsweek” article of 15 August 1977, indicates to the high reputation Tom Stoppard has won: Britain may be plagued by strikes, unemployment, inflation, a sinking pound and rising racial tension, but one of its institutions appears to be immune to be immune to ‘the British disease.’ British’s theatre is alive and well and living off the fruitful imagination of more than a score of talented playwrights. Of them all, Stoppard is the most highly praised and widely exported British playwright since Harold Pinter and John Osborne. His plays have been performed by more than 350 companies in nineteen countries - from Hungary to Japan, from South America to South Africa – and they have been translated into 30 languages. He is one of the few living playwrights whose works... are studied in universities around the world. [4] Born in Prague (3 July 1937) near the end of Czechoslovakia’s brief independence, Tomáš Straüssler lived in Singapore and Darjeeling, in north India, before his arrival in England. Being a refugee in these three different countries, Stoppard has been thrown into three alien cultures. This colourful background has constituted his frame of mind since he acquired the experience of family cultural heritage. When Stoppard first entered into the London stage in the mid-1960s, William W. Demastes, an American author states that the theatrical trends of British theatre “[were] dominated by two distinct ‘schools’ of drama, one being the [sic] kitchen- Tom Stoppard: The Amorality of the Artist Majeed Mohammed Midhin, Clare Finburgh A World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Vol:9, No:7, 2015 2578 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 9(7) 2015 ISNI:0000000091950263 Open Science Index, Humanities and Social Sciences Vol:9, No:7, 2015 publications.waset.org/10003010/pdf