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Travesties was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 19...)
Travesties was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries -- James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin -- were all living in Zurich. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholy riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.
Tom Stoppard: Plays 5 : Arcadia, The Real Thing, Night & Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood
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Plays Five:
Arcadia
The Real Thing
Night & Day
Indian I...)
Plays Five:
Arcadia
The Real Thing
Night & Day
Indian Ink
Hapgood
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. Arcadia received the Evening Standard, the Oliver, and the Critics Awards and The Real Thing won a Tony Award.
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Above all don’t use the word good as though it meant so...)
Above all don’t use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science.
The Hard Problem is a tour de force, exploring fundamental questions of how we experience the world, as well as telling the moving story of a young woman whose struggle for understanding her own life and the lives of others leads her to question the deeply held beliefs of those around her.
Hilary, a young psychology researcher at the Krohl Institute for Brain Science, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question. She and other researchers at the institute are grappling with what science calls the hard problem”if there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? What Hilary discovers puts her fundamentally at odds with her colleagues, who include her first mentor and one-time lover, Spike; her boss, Leo; and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.
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Tom Stoppard is the author of such seminal works as Ros...)
Tom Stoppard is the author of such seminal works as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and the trilogy The Coast of Utopia. His film credits include Parade's End, Shakespeare in Love, Enigma, and Anna Karenina.
Lee Hall is the author of screenplays including Billy Elliot and War Horse and plays including Spoonface Steinberg, Cooking With Elvis, and The Pitman Painters.
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In this meeting of two of the twentieth century's great...)
In this meeting of two of the twentieth century's greatest playwrights, Tom Stoppard has reinvigorated Luigi Pirandello's masterpiece of madness and sanity. After a fall from his horse, an Italian aristocrat believes he is the obscure medieval German emperor Henry IV. After twenty years of living this royal illusion, his beloved appears with a noted psychiatrist to shock the madman back to sanity. Their efforts expose that for the past twelve years the nobleman has in fact been sane. With his mask of madness removed, the aristocrat launches an offensive to deflect their unwanted attention. While Pirandello's characters race linguistically about in Stoppardian dervishes, battling for the upper hand-and the greatest laughs-one question emerges: What constitutes sanity?
Tom Stoppard: Plays 4: Dalliance, Undiscovered Country, Rough Crossing, On the Razzle, The Seagull (Faber Contemporary Classics) (v. 4)
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Dalliance
Undiscovered Country
Rough Crossing
On the Ra...)
Dalliance
Undiscovered Country
Rough Crossing
On the Razzle
The Seagull
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, a classic farce set aboard an ocean liner), Johann Nestroy (On the Razzle, a mad chase through Vienna), and Anton Chekhov (The Seagull, the classic Russian country tale). According to The Times of London, "Adaptation in Stoppard's terms means finding a sympathetic text and using it as a springboard for invention that leaves the original far behind." In adapting these plays--some classics, some nearly forgotten--for the modern stage, Tom Stoppard has added his own unique elements of dazzling wit and verbal brilliance, hilarious parody and cutting satire, to create works that stand as exceptional works of theater that do not belong to any one age.
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It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across th...)
It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. The river that flows through Tom Stoppards The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housmans youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student named Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the elder Housman confronts the younger version of himself and his memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson ?? the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings.
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Favorite Broadway Dramas)
(Comedy / 14m, 2f, 12 extras, 6 musicians / Unit set w. pl...)
Comedy / 14m, 2f, 12 extras, 6 musicians / Unit set w. platforms, cyc, drops. Winner of both the Tony and NY Drama Critics Circle awards. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the college chums of Hamlet and their story is what happened behind the scenes in Shakespeare's play. What were they doing there in Elsinore anyway? "I don't know; we were sent for." They are not only anti agents, but also anti sympathy, anti identification, and in fact anti persons, which is uniquely demonstrated by their having such a hard time recollecting which of them goes by what name. The Players come and go; Prince Hamlet comes through reading words, words, words; foul deeds are done; Hamlet is sent abroad, escapes death; and in turn Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find their "only exit is death." "Very funny, very brilliant, very chilling; it has the dust of thought about it and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air." - The New York Times "A stimulating, funny, imaginative comedy." - The New York Daily News
Tom Stoppard Plays: The Real Inspector Hound/Dirty Linen/Dogg's Hamlet/Cahoot's Macbeth/After Magritte/ New-found-land (Contemporary Classics)
(The plays in this collection reveal in combination the 'f...)
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.
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Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz...)
Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worms-eve view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeares play. In Tom Stoppards best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, where reality and illusion intermix, and where fate leads our two heroes to a tragic but inevitable end.
Tom Stoppard was catapulted into the front ranks of modem playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967. Its subsequent run in New York brought it the same enthusiastic acclaim, and the play has since been performed numerous times in the major theatrical centers of the world. It has won top honors for play and playwright in a poll of London Theater critics, and in its printed form it was chosen one of the ?Notable Books of 1967 by the American Library Association.
Tom Stoppard: Plays 3: A Separate Peace, Teeth, Another Moon Called Earth, Neutral Ground, Professional Foul, Squaring the Circle (Contemporary Classics) (v. 3)
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Plays Three:
A Separate Peace
Teeth
Another Moon Called...)
Plays Three:
A Separate Peace
Teeth
Another Moon Called Earth
Neutral Ground
Professional Foul
Squaring the Circle
Introduced by the author, this third collection of plays written 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 and timely Professional Foul demonstrates. In his introduction the author briefly describes how the pieces came to be written and the circumstances of their original production.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favor and Professional Foul (Tom Stoppard)
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It is Tom Stoppard's very special skill as the master c...)
It is Tom Stoppard's very special skill as the master comedian of ideas in the modern theater to create brilliant, biting humor out of serious concerns. Virtually assaulting the audience with a cascade of words and a conspicuous display of intellect, Stoppard, in "Every Good Boy Deserves Favor," contrasts the circumstances of a political prisoner and a mental patient in a Soviet insane asylum, to question the difference, if any, between free will and the freedom to conform. The situation, in which the mental patient "hears" an orchestra, is both chilling and funny as we are introduced to two men who happen to share the same name, are in carcerated in the same cell, and are attended by the same doctor.
Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997.
Background
The son of a doctor for the Bata shoe manufacturing company, Thomas Straussler (Stoppard) was born on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia.
According to Nazi racial laws there was "Jewish blood" in the family, so his father was transferred to Singapore in 1939, taking the family with him. When the Japanese invaded that city in 1942, the women and children were taken to India. Dr. Straussler stayed behind and was killed.
In 1945 his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a British Army major, and both of her sons took his name. The Stoppards went to England, where Stoppard's stepfather worked in the machine-tool industry.
Education
Stoppard attended an American boarding school in Darjeeling.
Thomas continued his education at a preparatory school in Yorkshire.
At age 17 he felt that he had had enough schooling and became first a reporter and then a critic for the Western Daily Press of Bristol from 1954 to 1958.
Career
At age 17 he felt that he had had enough schooling and became first a reporter and then a critic for the Western Daily Press of Bristol from 1954 to 1958. He left the Press and worked as a reporter for the Evening World, also in Bristol, from 1958 to 1960. Stoppard then worked as a free-lance reporter from 1960 to 1963.
During these years he experimented with writing short stories and short plays. In 1962 he moved to London in order to be closer to the center of the publishing and theatrical worlds in the United Kingdom. His first radio plays for the BBC (British Broadcasting Company)-The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and M Is for Moon Among Other Things-were aired in 1964, with two more, Albert's Bridge and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, following in 1965.
His first television play, A Separate Peace, appeared the next year, as did his only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, and the stage play that established his reputation as a playwright, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead takes two minor characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet and shows us the world of the Danish prince from a different perspective. Critic Charles Marowitz dubbed the show a "play-beneath-the-play. "
America's influential critic Harold Clurman wrote, "Based on a nice conceit, it is epigrammatically literate, intelligent, theatrically clever. " The play earned Stoppard his first Tony award. That same year, 1966, Stoppard produced Tango, based on a work by Slawomir Mrozek, and in 1967 he produced two television plays, Teeth and Another Moon Called Earth. The year 1968 saw another television play, Neutral Ground, and two short works for the theater; Enter a Free Man and The Real Inspector Hound. Of the former, critic Brendan Gill wrote that it has "a plot of no very great originality . .. an ending too neat for its own good, " while of the latter another critic, Clive Barnes, opined that it was a "spinoff" from Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.
In 1970 Stoppard returned to the BBC with the two radio plays, Artist Descending a Staircase and Where Are They Now, and authored the television plays The Engagement and Experiment in Television as well as the stage work After Magritte.
It was about this time that Stoppard became acquainted with Ed Berman from New York City's Off-Off-Broadway, who was attempting to establish an alternative theater in London. For him Stoppard composed Dogg's Our Pet, produced in 1971 at the Almost Free Theater; the feeble double bill of Dirty Linen and New-found-land in 1975; and Night and Day in 1978.
In 1972 Stoppard had presented Jumpers, his second major work, which begins with circus acts and evolves into religious and moral philosophy. As critic Victor Cahn put it,
Stoppard wrote the television play One Pair of Eyes with Clive Exton the same year. Two years later he produced his third major work, Travesties. It was based on the coincidence that Russian exile politician V. I. Lenin, Irish novelist James Joyce, and the father of the French Dadaist movement in literature and art, Tristan Tzara, were all in Zurich, Switzerland, at times during World War I. It is assumed that they never met in actuality, but their interaction in Stoppard's play illuminates the question of what constitutes art. The author's conclusion seems to be that its sole function is to make the meaninglessness of life more bearable. In 1977 Stoppard offered Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a tour de force premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the 100-piece London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andre Previn at the Royal Festival Hall.
Brought to the United States, it was presented at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York with an 81-piece orchestra. The play concerns a dissident in an Iron Curtain country who has been placed in a mental institution. Its attack on the totalitarian state was the author's strongest political statement up to that time. That same year he was named a Commander of the British Empire (CBE).
In 1979 came three plays; Undiscovered Country, based on Austrian playwright Artur Schnitzler's Das weite land; Dogg's Hamlet; and Cahoot's Macbeth. In 1982 his fourth major work was produced. The Real Thing won Stoppard his second Tony award in 1984. More psychological than his previous plays, The Real Thing concerns a literary man whose love is unfaithful to him and how he copes with his disillusionment.
Stoppard's later works have sought greater inter-personal depths, whilst maintaining their intellectual playfulness. Stoppard acknowledges that around 1982 he moved away from the "argumentative" works and more towards plays of the heart, as he became "less shy" about emotional openness. Discussing the later integration of heart and mind in his work, he commented "I think I was too concerned when I set off, to have a firework go off every few seconds. .. I think I was always looking for the entertainer in myself and I seem to be able to entertain through manipulating language. .. [but] it's really about human beings, it's not really about language at all. " The Real Thing (1982) uses a meta-theatrical structure to explore the suffering that adultery can produce and The Invention of Love (1997) also investigates the pain of passion. Arcadia (1993) explores the meeting of chaos theory, historiography, and landscape gardening. He was inspired by a Trevor Nunn production of Gorky's Summerfolk to write a trilogy of "human" plays: The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage, 2002).
Quotations:
Stoppard himself went so far as to declare "I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness. "
Discussing the later integration of heart and mind in his work, he commented "I think I was too concerned when I set off, to have a firework go off every few seconds. .. I think I was always looking for the entertainer in myself and I seem to be able to entertain through manipulating language. .. [but] it's really about human beings, it's not really about language at all. "
He went on, "Here it is two critics watching a conventional murder mystery who eventually find themselves dragged into the action of the play. In a sense the same existentialist attitude. .. ."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
But it was more than an oblique look at a dramatic classic. It was an examination of existentialist philosophy when the protagonists learn that they are to die and accept their fate. As Marowitz put it, the play "demonstrates a remarkable skill in juggling the donnees of existentialist philosophy. .. .We are summoned, we come. We are given roles, we play them. We are dismissed, we go. "
"The specific philosophical problem at the basis of George's [the protagonist's] inquiry is whether moral judgments are absolute or relative, whether their truth lies in correspondence with the facts of the world or whether they are . .. personal expressions of emotion. " Jumpers did not enjoy the same critical acclaim that had greeted Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.
Stanley Kauffmann labeled it "fake, structurally and thematically, " while John Simon wrote that "there is even something arrogant about trying to convert the history of Western culture into a series of blackout sketches, which is very nearly what Jumpers is up to. "
Again critical opinion was divided: Benedict Nightingale in the New Statesman summarized it this way: "He has maintained his humour, increased his complexity, and deepened his art. " Robert Brustein, on the other hand, saw it as "another clever exercise in the Mayfair mode, where all of the characters . .. share the same wit, artifice and ornamental diction. " Stoppard summed up his life's work as an attempt to "make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours. "
Connections
Stoppard has been married three times. His first marriage was to Josie Ingle (1965–1972), a nurse; his second marriage was to Miriam Stern (1972–92), whom he left to begin a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. He has two sons from each of his first two marriages: Oliver Stoppard, Barnaby Stoppard, the actor Ed Stoppard and Will Stoppard, who is married to violinist Linzi Stoppard. In 2014 he married Sabrina Guinness, daughter of James Edward Alexander Rundell Guinness and his wife Pauline Mander.