The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays

by Tom Stoppard

Plays deal with double agents, a man unable to pay his taxi fare, dentists, an historian and his wife, and a man who tries to check into a nursing home

Genres: Plays, Fiction, Theatre, Audiobook, Drama, Literature

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.

He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is laugh out loud funny. The infinite regression of the man unable to remember which side he is actually spying for is inspired. As is the discussion of the tulips.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating for the title play only; I couldn’t find a Goodreads listing for it on its own.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Democritus Junior · Rating 5 out of 5]

A complete hoot

[Arizonagirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have been staring at the title of this book on the shelf for years wondering why it was the dog that died. Now I know.

[Dr G · Rating 4 out of 5]

This offers quite a useful introduction to Tom Stoppard, with a range of forms of script, for a range of media, and with a number of his characteristics - and a few others - on show.
The Dog It Was That Died is a good early Stoppard with lots of absurdist humour and word-play. It is based around a host of government secret service agents who are not at all sure about what principles they are defending or, indeed, what nation. I think it probably helps to have read a lot of John le Carré. And with that foundation, the incompetence and confusion are very funny.
The Dissolution Of Dominic Boot is a very short pre-Python pythonesque piece about a man who finds himself with an ever-growing taxi bill as he rides the taxi to multiple places to try to raise the money for his fare. Dominic is the epitome of a universally put-upon victim. Sadly, that is partly humorous.
“M” Is For Moon Among Other Things is ultra-short about a fortyish couple who make some attempt to exercise their brains by reading through an encyclopaedia alphabetically. Only just amusing.
Teeth is a well-managed tv play about a dentist who implicitly tells his patient he knows he is having an affair with the dentist’s wife, all while rummaging around, and causing some pain, inside the patient’s mouth.
Another Moon Called Earth is an early version of what later became Jumpers , where it was much more fully developed.
Neutral Ground is very unstoppardian; while there are a few word-plays and moments of gentle humour, this is essentially a serious spy/secret agent story in which the point of it all is the confusing, confused and uncertain morality of the whole secret service business. Stoppard did it all much better in his film script of Graham Greene’s The Human Factor .
A separate Peace is an amusing short piece on the expectations people have about how others should act, with a completely healthy man choosing to have a quiet stay in a hospital, and finding that the institution struggles to cope with this unconventional situation.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 Extra:
Rupert is a spy, a counter-spy and a counter-counter-spy. No wonder he's suicidal. By Tom Stoppard. With Dinsdale Landen.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much my sense of humor! I did not realize it when I picked this book up, but I've read some of his other works and enjoyed them.

[Edmund Chattoe-Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taken as a whole not too many laughs and no great sense of purpose (the best Stoppard aligns them.) Some of these are frankly slight in concept and length (but I guess someone of his stature deserves to be "collected" regardless.) The two best ("The Dog It Was That Died" - in which a spy "doubles" so often he can't remember which side he is really on) and ("The Dissolution of Dominic Boot" - in which a man runs up a taxi bill he can't pay driving round in a taxi trying to get the money) are well worth the price of admission however.

[Chambers Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title play The Dog It was that Died is minor Stoppard.
But this volume also contains The Dissolution of Dominic Boot which is hilarious!

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

very funny and odd, some very witty lines. I liked the energy and pace of the dialogue. I didn't really enjoy the fugitive one but all the others were very funny and interesting. particularly liked the woman in another moon called earth

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea what to expect with this collection--my only other experience with Stoppard was the film based on his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and, from that, I assumed all his work would be as challenging. Instead, this is a collection of radio and teleplays--a couple of which are outright comedies--that center around deception; with Cold War spies, cheating husbands and financial incompetence. Yet even though they deal with deception, the plays themselves are straightforward, humorous (sometimes), and more entertaining than profound (but quite British, for all that).

I'm not well-schooled on the theater--I've tried to learn more about it by reading a variety of dramatists, and so far, I've enjoyed these the most of the modern playwrights that I've read. (Remember though, this is based on a very small sample size). Most of what I've read sounds stilted and false in my ears--Stoppard's dialogue seemed to me as if it came from real people.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised with this entertaining collection, and I'll be giving R&G and any other Stoppard plays I run across a closer look.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic Stoppard doing spies! Clever wordplay, complicated & convoluted story, and hilarious punchlines.