Tom Stoppard – författare

The new and updated edition of 'Tom Stoppard's extraordinary, epic drama of politics, persecution and protest in twentieth-century Czechoslovakia' (Evening Standard).Rock 'n' Roll spans the years from 1968 to 1990 from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock 'n' roll band comes to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime, and of Cambridge, where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher.Rock 'n' Roll premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2006. It was revived at Hampstead Theatre, London, in December 2023. This edition includes an introduction by the author.'The remarkable thing about the play is that it touches on so many themes, registers its lament at the erosion of freedom in our society and yet leaves you cheered by its wit, buoyancy and belief in the human spirit.' Guardian'Stunning.' The Times *****'Lusty, messy, exuberant.' Daily Telegraph ****'No-one writes plays quite like Tom Stoppard.' Time Out ****

The definitive edition of Tom Stoppard's masterpiece. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in.Arcadia premiered at the National Theatre, London, 1993, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Evening Standard Award for Best Play.'It is a laugh-filled tragedy about what happens if you take the intoxicants of poetry and science seriously. It is a play where Stoppard turns himself into a clown whose juggling balls are Romanticism, Classicism, and the meaning of life . . . The stale cliché about Stoppard is that he is a brilliant manipulator of ideas, but with no heart. Yet here - at the core of his best play - is the greatest love story on the British stage for decades. Yes, the characters bond over ideas - but some of the most interesting people in life do just that. That would be enough to make Arcadia a masterpiece - but it is even more than that. The play stirs the most basic and profound questions humans can ask. How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain - not just of ourselves, but of our species?' INDEPENDENT'I have never left a new play more convinced that I'd witnessed a masterpiece.' DAILY TELEGRAPH'A brilliant, brilliant play. A play of ideas, of consummate theatricality, of sophisticated entertainment and of heartache for time never to be regained.' SUNDAY TIMES

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play which, as it were, takes place in the wings of Hamlet, and finds both humour and poignancy in the situation of the ill-fated attendant lords. The National Theatre production in April 1967 made Tom Stoppard's reputation virtually overnight. Its wit, stagecraft and verbal verve remain as exhilarating as they were then and the play has become a contemporary classic.

Every Good Boy Deserves FavourA dissident is locked up in an asylum. If he accepts that he was ill and has been cured, he will be released. He refuses. Sharing his cell is a real lunatic who believes himself to be surrounded by an orchestra. As the dissident's son begs his father to free himself with a lie, Tom Stoppard's darkly funny and provocative play asks if denying the truth is a price worth paying for liberty.Every Good Boy premiered at the Festival Hall, London, in July 1977. It was revived at the National Theatre, London, in January 2009.Professional Foul'Professor Anderson, a somewhat devious academic, went to Prague to deliver a lecture on "Ethical Facts in Ethical Fiction" and to see a football match. Politics intruded when a former pupil of Anderson begged him to smuggle out a thesis arguing that "the ethics of the State can only be the ethics of the individual writ large" . . . Mr Stoppard's BBC television debut was sheer delight.' - Richard Last, Daily Telegraph'Plays which enhance civilization itself, which is what this does, are not seen once and laid away.' - Bernard Levin, Sunday TimesProfessional Foul was first shown on BBC TV in September 1977.

The Incredible Radical Liberal Jumpers are a team of acrobatic professors of philosophy, whose absurd gymnastic displays reflect a bewildering world where logic has confounded belief in moral absolutes. In this dark, exuberant comedy, Stoppard brilliantly parodies the philosophy lecture, the detective thriller, the comedy of manners and the Whitehall farce, to follow a philosopher's doomed flight to prove the existence of God in the face of an indifferent universe.This is the definitive text of Tom Stoppard's celebrated comedy.'A dazzling, hilarious and honestly benevolent work, which creates a dramatic structure from a forbidding diversity of materials.' The Times

Through a stony and inhospitable landscape ride a pair of attendant lords, cloaked and hatted against the cold. In this screenplay Stoppard recreates, in cinematic terms, his play about two minor characters from "Hamlet", Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The plays in this collection reveal in combination the 'frivolous' and 'serious' aspects of Tom Stoppard's talent: his sense of fun, his sense of theatre, his sense of the absurd, and his gifts for parody and satire. The author rounds off his brief introduction, giving the genesis of each piece, with the comment: 'The role of the theatre is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory'.Leading off is The Real Inspector Hound, the ultimate country-house whodunnit; Dirty Linen moves a Whitehall farce to Parliament Square; Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth subverts Shakespeare; and After Magritte explains the inexplicable.

It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories, however, are dramatically if confusedly alive. The river which flows through Tom Stoppard's play connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's early manhood where High Victorianism in art, literature and morality is being challenged by the Aesthetic movement and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst on to the London scene...The Invention of Love premiered at the National Theatre, London, in September 1997.

This third collection of plays by Tom Stoppard contains his television plays, written between 1965 and 1984. They show that Stoppard's writing for the small screen is comparable to his more celebrated stage work, as the masterly Professional Foul demonstrates. In his introduction the author briefly describes how the individual pieces came to be written and the circumstances of their original production.

This fourth volume of Tom Stoppard's work for the stage brings together five of his most celebrated translations and adaptations of plays by Arthur Schnitzler (Dalliance and Undiscovered Country), Ferenc Molnar (Rough Crossing), Johann Nestroy (On the Razzle) and Anton Chekhov (The Seagull).

This fifth collection of Tom Stoppard's plays brings together five classic plays by one of the most celebrated dramatists writing in the English language.The collection includes The Real Thing, Night & Day, Hapgood, Indian Ink and Arcadia, about which the reviewer for the Daily Telegraph said 'I have never left a new play more convinced that I'd just witnessed a masterpiece'.

The Coast of Utopia is an epic but also intimate drama of romantics and revolutionaries in an age of emperors. The three sequential, self-contained plays, Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, span the lives and loves of a group of Russian friends at home and abroad in the tumultuous years between 1833 and 1866. This new fully revised edition of the trilogy contains an introduction by the author.

With a new introduction by the authorTom Stoppard's first novel, originally published in 1966 soon after the premiere of his runaway success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, is a dazzling fantasy set in modern London. The cast includes a penniless, dandified Malquist with a liveried coach, his Boswellian biographer, Moon, who frantically scribbles as a bomb ticks in his pocket, a couple of cowboys, a lion who's banned from the Ritz, an Irishman on a donkey claiming to be the Risen Christ, and three irresistible women.'Superb fantasy, mad, sad and uproarious by turn.' Oxford Times'A highly imaginative and theatrical black comedy, with a cunningly contrived denouement whose absurdity is chillingly logical.' Glasgow Herald'A bizarre book, full of pastiche, with language continually tripping up its characters.' Yorkshire Post'Lord Malquist and Mr Moon takes place in a dream-London where everything is seen through a haze of despair, and cowboys and a coach-and-pair and a pet lion wander with innumerable others through the plot, giving it a kind of child-like surrealism. It manages to be sad without being sentimental, and to give its fantasies a wit and exactness that make them fruitful and rewarding.' Sunday Telegraph

'Not only Mr. Stoppard's most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years.' (New York Times)I do envy you being married to a man with a sense of humour. Henry thinks he has a sense of humour, but what he has is a joke reflex.The play begins with Max and Charlotte, a couple whose marriage seems about to rupture. But nothing one sees on a stage is the real thing, and some things are less real than others. Charlotte is an actress who has been appearing in a play about marriage written by her husband Henry. Max, her leading man, is also married to an actress, Annie. Both marriages are at the point of rupture because Henry and Annie have fallen in love. But is it the real thing?The Real Thing premiered at the Strand Theatre, London, in 1982, winning the Evening Standard Award for Best Play. It received the Tony Award for Best Play in 1984, and, in 2000, the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.'What is this thing called love? In The Real Thing, we watch Henry find the answer - and we watch Mr. Stoppard do so too. The author of such high-flying neo-Shavian farces as Jumpers and Travesties turns his attention to private passion - and he does so without mortgaging an intellect that has few equals in the contemporary theater. The Real Thing is not only Mr. Stoppard's most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years . . . so densely and entertainingly packed with wit, ideas and feelings that one visit just won't do.' FRANK RICH, NEW YORK TIMES

This second collection of work by Tom Stoppard contains his radio plays, which complement (and sometimes prefigure) his work for the stage. The volume includes In the Native State, which became the stage play Indian Ink.Also in this volume are The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, 'M' is for Moon Among Other Things, If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died and an introduction by the author.This new edition contains the previously unpublished radio play, On 'Dover Beach'.

I can't remember which side I'm supposed to be working for, and it is not in fact necessary for me to know.The Cold War is approaching its endgame and somebody in spymaster Elizabeth Hapgood's network is leaking secrets. Is her star double agent really a triple? The trap she sets becomes a hall of mirrors in which betrayal is personal and treachery a trick of the light.Tom Stoppard's Hapgood premiered at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in March 1988. It was revived at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in December 2015.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2017, Tom Stoppard's witty and exhilarating play is repackaged as a stylish Faber Modern Classic.Tom Stoppard's reputation as a playwright was made when his dazzling debut, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, opened at the National Theatre. Fifty years later, the play's wit, stagecraft and verbal verve remain as exhilarating as they were in 1967 as the two ill-fated attendant lords from Shakespeare's Hamlet take centre stage, musing on the purpose of existence and its end. This new edition was published to coincide with a 50th anniversary production at the Old Vic Theatre, London, and contains a new preface by the author.

'Tom Stoppard's Travesties is witty, playful and wise. Forty years on, it is starting to look timeless as well.' Sunday Times'It is a champagne cocktail, compounded of a balletic nimbleness of invention, a bewildering intricacy of design which reaches the sublime heights where mathematics merge with poetry, and the audacious juggling of a master conjuror.' Sunday Telegraph 'A dazzling pyrotechnical feat that combines Wildean pastiche, political history, artistic debate, spoof reminiscence, and song-and-dance in marvellously judicious proportions. The text itself is a Joycean web of literary allusions; yet it also radiates sheer intellectual joie de vivre, as if Stoppard were delightedly communicating the fruits of his own researches.' GuardianTravesties was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in June 1974. This edition includes a new preface by the author, and revisions made by him for a revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, in October 2016.?

Above all don't use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science.Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness?This is 'the hard problem' which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry.Is the day coming when the computer and the fMRI scanner will answer all the questions psychology can ask? Meanwhile Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard premiered at the National Theatre, London, in January 2015.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna. But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered in the Merz apartment in a fashionable part of the city, Hermann's extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama. By the time we have taken leave of them, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and - for Austrian Jews - the Holocaust in which 65,000 of them were murdered. It is for the survivors to pass on a story which hasn't ended yet.Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt was first performed at Wyndham's Theatre, London, in January 2020.WINNER: OLIVIER AWARD FOR BEST NEW PLAY, 2020WINNER: TONY AWARD FOR BEST PLAY, 2023Winner of the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play; the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play; the Drama League Award for Outstanding Production; and the Outer Critics' Circle Award for Outstanding New Broadway Play.'One of Britain's greatest living playwrights to provide his most personal play yet.' The Times'The news that Tom Stoppard has written a new drama ranks as top-end seismic activity.' Daily Telegraph

Let others sing of war and a hero buffeted by fate. I sing of marriage and a marriage bed, and the endurance of love.With an introduction by the author, this is Tom Stoppard in the voice of Odysseus's wife recalling how the Trojan War 'took away my husband for ten years, and ten more coming the long way home', and Odysseus's dramatic arrival back on Ithaca.Weaving Homeric tropes with the wry wit of a woman of our time, Penelope tells this still vibrant love story from the oldest poem in Western literature.

Stoppard's rich and moving meditation on art and love, set against one of the great shifts of history, as India regained its independence from the grip of the British Empire. If you don't start learning to take you'll never be shot of us. Nothing else counts. It's your country, and we've got it. Everything else is bosh.Flora Crewe, a noted young Bloomsbury Group poet travelling India in 1930, has her portrait painted by a local artist, Nirad Das. More than fifty years later, the artist's son visits Flora's sister, Mrs Swan, in London while Flora's would-be biographer is following a cold trail in India.Indian Ink was first performed at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, and opened at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in 1995. The play was revived at Hampstead Theatre, London, in December 2025.

This is Tom Stoppard's award-winning play, set in Derbyshire. The orderly classicism of Lady Croom's Capability Brown grounds are being turned into picturesque romantic chaos, as fashion dictates, by landscape architect "Culpability Noakes". In a Regency room overlooking the work is Lady Croom's brilliant adolescent daughter - Thomasina Coverly, with her handsome, clever tutor Septimus Hodge. Their maths lesson is disturbed by, among others, the imperious, amorous Lady Croom and Ezra Chater, a cuckold and minor poet, determined on satisfaction. One hundred and eighty years later, in the same room, a corresponding group, comprising a mathematician, a biographer/historian, and a vulgar academic, try to unravel the events of 1809 - with spectacularly wrong results.