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.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573614927
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
Originally published: New York: Grove Press, 1967.

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.

Rough Crossing

Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571164004
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 141

Book Description
Based on a classic farce, Play at the Castle by Ferenc Molnar, Rough Crossing takes place on shipboard as two playwrights struggle to finish a musical comedy and rehearse it before docking in New York in On the Razzle, adapted from Einen Jux will er sich machen by Johann Nestroy, two shop assistants live it up while dodging their employer in the restaurants and nightspots of Nestroy's nineteenth-century Vienna. Both words and action reveal Tom Stoppard as a master of comic technique.

We Haven't Got There Yet

Author: Harry Turtledove
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1429924772
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Book Description
William Shakespeare is mightily out of sorts -- every scribbling wagtail cullion in London is shamelessly pilfering his ideas, and this new fellow is the cheekiest of all. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? What kind of name is that for a play? Find out in Harry Turtledove's Tor.com Original, We Haven't Got there Yet. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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".

Analysis of 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead'

Author: Karl Mattern
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638667588
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 52

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim (Lehrstuhl Anglistik II), course: Classics of 20th Century British Drama, 8 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in its present form is the result of several drafts and older versions of this play, which Tom Stoppard wrote and staged. The first one was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meet King Lear and was performed by amateur actors at a Ford Foundation cultural picnic in Berlin, in 1964. In this form the play was a one-act comedy in verse.1 In the following years the title changed and Stoppard rewrote the play into prose. At the Edinburgh Festival in 1966 the play had its break through and soon later its script was bought and produced by the National Theatre at the Old Vic. According to the Sunday Times it was "the most important event in the British professional theatre of the last nine years."2 The reason for the enthusiastic reactions towards the play is the fact that it illustrates the confusion of mankind in the post-modern world. Today's pluralism leaves the individual all to himself. The unity, which used to be created by religion, class or moral values, has been split up in favour of countless parallel existing societies with their own moral ideals and goals. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a comical depiction of two friends looking for an orientation in a world, which to them has lost its orders and values. By using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are the two courtiers from Elsinore, from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Stoppard shows an unknown perspective of Hamlet. It is the one of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Without knowing the entire plot they experience the action from their point of view and constantly try to find explanations of their roles and future in the play. The lack of orientation and the absence of reliable values in this strange world re

Stoppard's Theatre

Author: John Fleming
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292725522
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
With a thirty-year run of award-winning, critically acclaimed, and commercially successful plays, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) to The Invention of Love (1997), Tom Stoppard is arguably the preeminent playwright in Britain today. His popularity also extends to the United States, where his plays have won three Tony awards and his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. John Fleming offers the first book-length assessment of Stoppard's work in nearly a decade. He takes an in-depth look at the three newest plays (Arcadia, Indian Ink, and The Invention of Love) and the recently revised versions of Travesties and Hapgood, as well as at four other major plays (Rosencrantz, Jumpers, Night and Day, and The Real Thing). Drawing on Stoppard's personal papers at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRHRC), Fleming also examines Stoppard's previously unknown play Galileo, as well as numerous unpublished scripts and variant texts of his published plays. Fleming also mines Stoppard's papers for a fuller, more detailed overview of the evolution of his plays. By considering Stoppard's personal views (from both his correspondence and interviews) and by examining his career from his earliest scripts and productions through his most recent, this book provides all that is essential for understanding and appreciating one of the most complex and distinctive playwrights of our time.

Hamlet

Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781638435020
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

A Delicate Balance

Author: Edward Albee
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468307517
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Book Description
Visitors cause trouble for a pair of suburbanites in this Pulitzer Prize–winning play by the author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Wealthy middle-aged couple Agnes and Tobias have their complacency shattered when their longtime friends Harry and Edna appear at their doorstep. Claiming an encroaching, nameless “fear” has forced them from their own home, these neighbors bring a firestorm of doubt, recrimination and ultimately solace, upsetting the “delicate balance” of Agnes and Tobias’s household . . . In recent years, A Delicate Balance has enjoyed many and new stunning revivals, running now, including a Broadway production in 1996, which won the Tony Award for Best Revival, and another at the Alameida Theatre in London in 2011. “Theatrical fireworks.” —The New York Times