Tom Stoppard

La invención del amor, estrenada en Londres por el Royal National Theatre en 1998, tiene como personaje central a A. E. Housman (académico y traductor de Propercio) y como emblemática contracara Oscar Wilde. ¿El arte o la vida? ¿Ofrendarse a la pasión o al renunciamiento?¿Optar siguiendo el dilema de Yeats entre "la perfección en la vida o en el trabajo"? Sobre el eje de estas cuestiones esenciales, la obra desliza un discurso paralelo: el de la creación de la poesía amorosa a partir de Cátulo y Horacio y la historicidad de los sentimientos, su "corrupción" como en las malas versiones, sus censuras, sus fracasos. El proceso a Oscar Wilde y la escena intelectual, moral y sexual victoriana (Ruskin, Pater, Frank Harris, Jerome K. Jerome entre otros) constituyen el telón de fondo de esta obra reflexiva y profundamente conmovedora.

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.

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

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 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

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.

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.

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

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 Stoppards play connects Hades with the Oxford of Housmans 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 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.

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.