Search results for ""author tom stoppard""

Let others sing of war and a hero buffeted by fate. I sing of marriage and a marriage bed, and the endurance of love.With an introduction by the author, this is Tom Stoppard in the voice of Odysseus's wife recalling how the Trojan War 'took away my husband for ten years, and ten more coming the long way home', and Odysseus's dramatic arrival back on Ithaca.Weaving Homeric tropes with the wry wit of a woman of our time, Penelope tells this still vibrant love story from the oldest poem in Western literature.

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Above all don't 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.

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I can't remember which side I'm 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 Hapgood's 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 Stoppard's Hapgood premiered at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in March 1988. It was revived at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in December 2015.

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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.

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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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Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2017, Tom Stoppard's witty and exhilarating play is repackaged as a stylish Faber Modern Classic.Tom Stoppard's reputation as a playwright was made when his dazzling debut, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, opened at the National Theatre. Fifty years later, the play's wit, stagecraft and verbal verve remain as exhilarating as they were in 1967 as the two ill-fated attendant lords from Shakespeare's Hamlet take centre stage, musing on the purpose of existence and its end. This new edition was published to coincide with a 50th anniversary production at the Old Vic Theatre, London, and contains a new preface by the author.

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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 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'Plays which enhance civilization itself, which is what this does, are not seen once and laid away.' - Bernard Levin, Sunday TimesProfessional Foul was first shown on BBC TV in September 1977.

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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 ****

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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.

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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).

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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

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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 '500 acres inclusive of lake' where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the 'picturesque' 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 has arrived to uncover the scandal which is said to have taken place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park.Tom Stoppard's absorbing play takes us back and forth between the centuries and explores the nature of truth and time, the difference between the Classical and the Romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life - 'the attraction', as Hannah says, 'which Newton left out'.

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'Tom Stoppard's Travesties is witty, playful and wise. Forty years on, it is starting to look timeless as well.' Sunday Times'It 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 a master conjuror.' Sunday Telegraph 'A 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.' GuardianTravesties was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in June 1974. This edition includes a new preface by the author, and revisions made by him for a revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, in October 2016.?

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Tom Stoppard's first novel, originally published in 1966 just before the premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is an uproarious fantasy set in modern London. The cast includes a penniless, dandified Malquist with a liveried coach; Malquist's Boswellian biographer, Moon, who frantically scribbles as a bomb ticks in his pocket; a couple of cowboys, one being named Jasper Jones; a lion who's banned from the Ritz; an Irishman on a donkey claiming to be the Risen Christ; and three irresistible women.

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Flora Crewe, a young poet travelling India in 1930, has her portrait painted by a local artist. More than fifty years later, the artist's son visits Flora's sister in London while her would-be biographer is following a cold trail in India.The alternation of place and period in Tom Stoppard's 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.

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I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all.Promising young playwright Will Shakespeare is tormented by writer's block until he finds his muse in the form of passionate noblewoman, Viola De Lesseps. Their forbidden love draws many others, including Queen Elizabeth, into the drama and inspires Will to write the greatest love story of all time, Romeo and Juliet.Based on Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's Oscar-winning screenplay, Lee Hall's stage adaptation of Shakespeare in Love premiered in July 2014 at the Noel Coward Theatre, London, in a co-production by Disney and Sonia Friedman Productions.

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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'.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Liubov Ranevskya, a widowed landowner returns home more or less insolvent after five years abroad. Everything appears just as she remembers, but hers is a diminishing world. Her vast and beautiful cherry orchard is soon to be sold off against her mounting debts. The insistent warnings of Lopakhin, a peasant's son turned wealthy businessman, go unheeded, and more than the family estate is sacrificed as Trofimov, the 'eternal student' who hopes to inherit the future, tells her, "The whole of Russia is our orchard".Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Chekhov's last play is a poignant snapshot of the great, slow-rolling change that came to a head with the Russian revolution in 1917. Tom Stoppard's English version of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard had its first New York performance at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn in January 2009, and its first London performance at the Old Vic Theatre in May 2009.

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One must strive a little for the epic, old boy.It's 1959 and Philippe, Gustave and Henri, three veterans from the first world war, dream of making their escape from the soldiers' home, if not to Indochina then at least as far as the poplar trees on the hill...Gérald Sibleyras's Le Vent des Peupliers premiered at the Wyndham's Theatre, London, in October 2005 as Heroes, an English-language version by Tom Stoppard. It received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2006.

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Mick Rock is the foremost rock photographer of his generation. In Exposed, he reveals his definitive collection of images, telling the story in his own words of his early career and the larger-than-life characters with whom he mixed. As well as being a retrospective of his work, it is a cultural journey through a time when rock ruled. It is a compendium of experiences, eyewitness accounts, and intimate detail, all culminating in candid incidental visual insights and time-tested iconic imagery that we all recognise today. This is a vivid and memorable account of Rock's adventures behind the camera, a colourful blend of the overt and the intimate, the beautiful and the irreverent - truly exposed.

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