[1] Tom Stoppard wrote After Magritte during the period of his well-known plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound.
The idea struck for After Magritte came to him while writing the Radio play Artist Descending a Staircase, which was based on a Marcel Duchamp painting of a similar name.
Most of the furniture is stack up against the street door in a sort of barricade, an essential item is a long low bench-type table, about eight feet long, but the pile also includes a settee, two comfortable chairs, a TV set, a cupboard and a wind up gramophone with an old-fashioned horn…”[5] The set as described by Stoppard resembles the beginning of the play Tango by Slawomir Mrożek, which was translated by Stoppard in 1966.
[4] The play begins with an astonished policeman looking through the window of a house where a group of people are posed in a bizarre, surreal tableau reminiscent of the paintings of René Magritte.
Randolph Ryan praised After Magritte as “a clever and funny look at the problem of determining reality, reduced from philosophic terms to those of farce.”[7] Theresa Montana Sabo dubbed it "witty" along with The Real Inspector Hound (1968).
[8] Jadwiga Uchman called the play "hilariously funny" in 1999 and argued, "Stoppard wittily employs language to create confusion, making it clear that it is an imperfect tool for describing reality."
[10] Jess M. Bravin of The Harvard Crimson said that the play is, like The Real Inspector Hound, weaker in character development and plot than in dialogue, but that this is a less important flaw in the case of After Magritte because of its brevity.
[11] Adam Langer praised the exchanges between the five characters about the man walking near the gallery as "hilariously whimsical and disorienting [...] despite the sophomoric philosophizing about perceptions, the play, with its many inspired sight gags and turns of phrase, can be a hoot.