Tom Stoppard

In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the "five hundred acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the Gothic style: "everything but vampires," as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard...

"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...

"Taking its title from the old Jewish quarter of Vienna, Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Gretl, a Catholic. As the play begins, Gretl is hosting her extended family at their fashionable Vienna apartment at Christmastime, 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust,...

Comprising of three sequential plays, The Coast of Utopia chronicles the story of romantics and revolutionaries caught up in a struggle for political freedom in an age of emperors. The Coast of Utopia is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term 'intelligentsia' was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was...

"While on a visit to India, the young poet Flora Crewe has her portrait painted by Nirad Das, an Indian artist. Das, however, has painted two portraits of Crewe: a "proper" one and a nude, the latter remaining in the possession of his son. The nude represents the "more Indian" side of Nirad Das, which is exactly how Crewe wants him to be, for if he anglicized himself she would despise him, since he would be attempting to bring the bloodlines closer...

Stoppard's masterful adaptation of Chekhov's best-loved play has been lauded by critics for its shining prose as well as its faithfulness. The play opens at a country estate, where a group of friends and relations have gathered to see the first performance of an experimental play, written and staged by the young man of the house, Konstantin. Among the audience are Konstantin's mother, the actress Arkadina, and her lover, the famous novelist Trigorin....

Alongside his many major plays, Tom Stoppard has written several highly acclaimed translations and adaptations of works by other writers, which are collected together here for the first time, together with a new introduction by Stoppard. Five European Plays includes adaptations of plays by four major European dramatists-Johann Nestroy, Arthur Schnitzler, Ferenc Molnár, and Václav Havel-Stoppard transports us to settings as diverse as nineteenth-century...

Culled from nearly twenty years of the playwright's career, a showcase for Tom Stoppard's dazzling range and virtuosic talent, The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays is essential reading for fans of modern drama. The plays in this collection reveal Stoppard's sense of fun, his sense of theater, his sense of the absurd, and his gifts for parody and satire.

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...

Plagued by debt, tormented by writer's block and in desperate need of a new hit, promising new playwright Will Shakespeare finds his muse in the form of passionate young noblewoman Viola De Lesseps. Their forbidden love soon draws everyone, including Queen Elizabeth, into the drama, and inspires Will to write the greatest love story of all time: Romeo and Juliet. Based on the Oscar-winning screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in...