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 ****

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.

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

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.

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

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 Deserves Favour premiered at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in July 1977. André Previn's score was conducted by its composer and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. The 'play for actors and orchestra' was revived at the National Theatre, London, in January 2009.'This extraordinary play marked a turning point in Tom Stoppard's work in 1977: it showed him moving away from exuberant extravaganzas towards engagement with the world's injustice . . . a play that brilliantly counters Soviet iron with Stoppardian irony, and shows the terrors of living in an orchestrated society.' Michael Billington, Guardian Professional FoulTom Stoppard's debut film for BBC television, first broadcast in September 1977, 'was sheer delight' (Daily Telegraph).In Professional Foul, a Cambridge don travels to Prague to deliver a lecture, and to watch a football match. When a former student asks him to smuggle his thesis out of the country, the professor faces an ethical dilemma. 'Plays which enhance civilization itself, which is what this does, are not seen once and laid away.' Bernard Levin, Sunday Times

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

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.

'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

'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'.

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'.

Tom Stoppard's dramatisation for BBC TV of Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford will bring new readers to the novel as well as giving Stoppard's audience much that is original to his inventive version of a masterwork of modernist English literature. This is the story of Christopher Tietjens, the 'last Tory', his beautiful, disconcerting wife Sylvia, and the virginal young suffragette Valentine Wannop who completes this triangle of love among the English upper class before and during the Great War.

In one of our greatest contemporary plays, set in two distinct centuries, Tom Stoppard explores the nature of truth, time, sex and attraction with absorbing and tragic humour.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

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.

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.'Plays which enhance civilization itself, which is what this does, are not seen once and laid away.' Bernard Levin, Sunday TimesEvery 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

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.

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.

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

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.'One of the most original and engaging of post-war plays.' Daily Telegraph

Salvage is the final part of Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia. It is 1852. Alexander Herzen, who left Russia five years earlier, has arrived in London in retreat from a series of public and private calamities. Revolution in Europe has hit the rocks. 'I have lost every illusion dear to me,' he says. 'I'm forty. The world will hear no more of me.' But émigré circles in London (including Karl Marx) are buzzing with plots and intrigues, and Herzen's money, as well as his sardonic wit, soon have an outlet among them. With the accession of Alexander II, 'the Reforming Tsar', Herzen's revived spirits are boosted by the arrival of his childhood friend Nicholas Ogarev with his wife Natalie. Their journal 'The Bell', smuggled into Russia, enters its heyday in the struggle for the emancipation of the serfs. Will it be reform from above or revolution from below? At home the 'new men' who once looked on Herzen as their inspiration are in a hurry, and in London he is once more at odds with Michael Bakunin, who has escaped from exile in Siberia. Meanwhile Natalie Ogarev finds in him her romantic ideal, and Herzen's public and private travails are far from over.

Shipwreck is the second part of Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia. It continues the story of the anarchist Michael Bakunin, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, the writer Ivan Turgenev, and their circle, but as the action shifts from Russia to Paris in the year of European revolution, it is Alexander Herzen and his wife Natalie who come to occupy the focus. Isaiah Berlin called Herzen a writer and thinker of genius, one of the greatest of nineteenth-century Russians; and it was here, in the intoxicating anticipation and the dashed hopes of the 1848 revolution - when the loss of his political illusions were overshadowed by a series of personal calamities - that Herzen found his greatness, seeking the way forward for Russia, the just society and the good life.

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'.