Tom Stoppard

This fourth volume of Tom Stoppards 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).

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour A 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 dissidents son begs his father to free himself with a lie, Tom Stoppards 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 FoulProfessor 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 Stoppards BBC television debut was sheer delight. Richard Last, Daily Telegraph

Tom Stoppards dramatisation for BBC TV of Parades End by Ford Madox Ford will bring new readers to the novel as well as giving Stoppards 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.

Salvage is the final part of Tom Stoppards 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. Im forty. The world will hear no more of me. But emigre circles in London (including Karl Marx) are buzzing with plots and intrigues, and Herzens money, as well as his sardonic wit, soon have an outlet among them. With the accession of Alexander II, the Reforming Tsar, Herzens 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 Herzens public and private travails are far from over.

Voyage is the first part of Tom Stoppards trilogy The Coast of Utopia, an epic but also intimate drama of romantics and revolutionaries in an age of emperors. Beginning in 1833, Voyage takes up the story of the future anarchist Michael Bakunin when his stage was still Premukhino, the Bakunin family estate, and Moscow under the repressive rule of Tsar Nicolas I, and when Michael and his four sisters, like many upper-class Russians of their generation, were in the thrall of German idealistic philosophy. I knew there were families, remarks his friend, the brilliant young critic Vissarion Belinsky. I come from a family. But I had no idea. But family life, with its passionate ties and conflagrations, all in the cause of exalted love and idealism, is left behind for ever when Michael at the age of twenty-six sets sail for Germany, waved goodbye by his newest friend, the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russian history, Alexander Herzen: the move from pure thought to revolutionary action is on the horizon.

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 philosophers doomed flight to prove the existence of God in the face of an indifferent universe. This is the definitive text of Tom Stoppards celebrated comedy.A dazzling, hilarious and honestly benevolent work, which creates a dramatic structure from a forbidding diversity of materials.The Times

WINNER: OLIVIER AWARD FOR BEST NEW PLAY, 2020WINNER: TONY AWARD FOR BEST PLAY, 2023 At the beginning of the 20th 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, Hermanns extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppards 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 hasnt ended yet. Tom Stoppards Leopoldstadt was first performed at Wyndhams Theatre, London, in January 2020.One of Britains greatest living playwrights to provide his most personal play yet.The TimesThe news that Tom Stoppard has written a new drama ranks as top-end seismic activity.Daily Telegraph

Tom Stoppards provocative new play spans the recent history of Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution - but from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock n roll band came to symbolise resistance to the regime, and the British left, represented by a Communist philosopher at Cambridge.Rock n Roll premieres at The Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2006 and is part of the 50th anniversary programme.

Travesties is a superb comedy, a work of thought and imagination.Stage and TelevisionIt 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 ideas of a master conjuror.Sunday TelegraphA 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.Guardian

Above all dont 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.

The plays in this collection reveal in combination the frivolous and serious aspects of Tom Stoppards 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; Doggs Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth subverts Shakespeare; and After Magritte explains the inexplicable.

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.

I cant remember which side Im 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 Hapgoods 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 Stoppards Hapgood premiered at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in March 1988. It was revived at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in December 2015.

Flora Crewe, a young poet travelling India in 1930, has her portrait painted by a local artist. More than fifty years later, the artists son visits Floras sister in London while her would-be biographer is following a cold trail in India. The alternation of place and period in Tom Stoppards play (based on his radio play In the Native State) makes for a rich and moving exploration of intimate lives set against one of the great shifts of history, the emergence of the Indian sub-continent from the grip of Empire.Indian Ink was first performed at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, and opened at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in February 1995.

Above all dont 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 premieres at the National Theatre, London, in January 2015.

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 Stoppards 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

Shipwreck is the second part of Tom Stoppards 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 fifth collection of Tom Stoppards 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 Id just witnessed a masterpiece.

This third collection of plays by Tom Stoppard contains his television plays, written between 1965 and 1984. They show that Stoppards 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 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 Youre Glad Ill Be Frank, Alberts 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.