Jumpers

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802195385
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Book Description
Tom Stoppers's play "Jumpers" is both a high-spirited comedy and a serious attempt to debate the existence of a moral absolute, of metaphysical reality, of God. Michael Billington in "The Guardian" described the play succinctly: "The new Radical Liberal Party has made the ex-Minister of Agriculture Archbishop of Cantebury, British astronauts are scrapping with each other on the moon, and spritely academics steal about London by night indulging in murderous gymnastics: this is the kind of manic, futuristic, topsy-turvy world in which Stoppard's dazzling new play is set. And if I add that the influences apparently include Wittgenstein, Magritte, the Goons, Robert Dhery, Joe Orton, and The Avengers, you will have some idea of the heady brew Stoppard has here concocted." The protagonist incude an aging Professor Of Moral Philosophy -- trying to compose a lecture on "Man -- Good, Bad or Indifferent" -- while ignoring a corpse in the next room; his beautiful young wife, an ex-musical comedy Queen, lasciviously entertaining his university boss down the hall; her husband's specially trained hare, Thumpers; and a chorus of gymnasts, Jumpers.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 155584894X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description
Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm’s-eve view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play. In Tom Stoppard’s 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.

The Invention of Love

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802135810
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
Poetry, scholarship, and love are entwined in Tom Stoppard's new play about A.E. Housman, which "Variety" has called "vintage Stoppard in its intelligence and wit". "Stoppard is at the top of form. . . . "The Invention of Love" does not just make you think, it also makes you feel".--"Daily Telegraph".

The Hard Problem

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802190502
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 71

Book Description
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.

Tom Stoppard

Author: Hermione Lee
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0451493230
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 896

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • One of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights, drawing on a wealth of new materials and on many conversations with him. “An extraordinary record of a vital and evolving artistic life, replete with textured illuminations of the plays and their performances, and shaped by the arc of Stoppard’s exhilarating engagement with the world around him, and of his eventual awakening to his own past.” —Harper's Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love—remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences. Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Václav Havel. Having long described himself as a "bounced Czech," Stoppard only learned late in life of his mother's Jewish family and of the relatives he lost to the Holocaust. Lee's absorbing biography seamlessly weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful, and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man.

Tom Stoppard: Plays 5

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0571197515
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 611

Book Description
This fifth collection of Tom Stoppard's plays brings together five classics by one of the most celebrated dramatists writing in the English language.

Indian Ink

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802188885
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
From Tony Award-winning playwright Tom Stoppard, Indian Ink is a rich and moving portrait of intimate lives set against one of the great shafts of history—the emergence of the Indian subcontinent from the grip of Europe. The play follows free-spirited English poet Flora Crewe on her travels through India in the 1930s, where her intricate relationship with an Indian artist unfurls against the backdrop of a country seeking its independence. Fifty years later, in 1980s England, her younger sister Eleanor attempts to preserve the legacy of Flora’s controversial career, while Flora’s would-be biographer is following a cold trail in India. Fresh from the critically acclaimed off-Broadway performance in 2014, Indian Ink is reemerging as an important part of Stoppard’s oeuvre and the global dramatic canon, a fascinating, time-hopping masterwork.

Travesties

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802150899
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Book Description
Satire on politics, literature and art. James Joyce, Lenin, and Dadaist Tristan Tzara come together in the memories of an obscure English diplomat (Henry Wilfred Carr) in Zürich. (Song and dance routines. Prologue, 2 acts, 5 men, 3 women, 2 interiors).

Tom Stoppard’s Plays

Author: Nigel Purse
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004319654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 686

Book Description
In Tom Stoppard’s Plays: Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony Nigel Purse assesses the complete canon of Tom Stoppard’s works on a thematic basis. He explains that, amongst the plenitude of chaotic comedy, wordplay and intellectual ping-pong of Stoppard’s plays, the principle of parsimony that is Occam’s razor lies at the heart of his works. He identifies key patterns in theme – ethics and duality - and method – Stoppard’s stage debates and his dramatic vehicles - as well as in theatrical devices. Quoting extensively from all Stoppard’s published works, many of his interviews and also unpublished material Nigel Purse arrives at a comprehensive and unique appraisal of Stoppard’s plays.

Leopoldstadt

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802157726
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Book Description
**Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play** Finally making its Broadway debut in a limited engagement run, Tom Stoppard’s humane and heartbreaking Olivier Award-winning play of love, family, and endurance At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard’s epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 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, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone. From one of today’s most acclaimed playwrights, Leopoldstadt is a human and heartbreaking drama of literary brilliance, historical verisimilitude, and powerful emotion.