Tom Stoppard

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.

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.

In one of our greatest contemporary plays, set in two distinct centuries, Tom Stoppard explores the nature of truth, time, sex and attraction with absorbing and tragic humour.Comparing what were looking for misses the point. Its wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise were going out the way we came in.Arcadia premiered at the National Theatre, London, 1993, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Evening Standard Award for Best Play.It is a laugh-filled tragedy about what happens if you take the intoxicants of poetry and science seriously. It is a play where Stoppard turns himself into a clown whose juggling balls are Romanticism, Classicism, and the meaning of life . . . The stale cliche about Stoppard is that he is a brilliant manipulator of ideas, but with no heart. Yet here - at the core of his best play - is the greatest love story on the British stage for decades. Yes, the characters bond over ideas - but some of the most interesting people in life do just that. That would be enough to make Arcadia a masterpiece - but it is even more than that. The play stirs the most basic and profound questions humans can ask. How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain - not just of ourselves, but of our species? INDEPENDENTI have never left a new play more convinced that Id witnessed a masterpiece.DAILY TELEGRAPHA brilliant, brilliant play. A play of ideas, of consummate theatricality, of sophisticated entertainment and of heartache for time never to be regained.SUNDAY TIMES

Tom Stoppards take on the story of Penelope, in her own voice, published in pamphlet form with an introduction by the author.Let others sing of war and a hero buffeted by fate. I sing of marriage and a marriage bed, and the endurance of love.In this radiant prose-poem, Odysseuss wife tells of the long years awaiting her husbands return, and of his dramatic arrival back on the island of Ithaca.Weaving together the lush imagery of Homeric epic with a wryly modern wit and sensibility, Penelopes voice emerges in a wise and resonant retelling of an ancient, still vital love story.

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

Shipwreck is the second part of Tom Stoppards 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.

Voyage is the first part of Tom Stoppards trilogy The Coast of Utopia, an epic but also intimate drama of romantics and revolutionaries in an age of emperors.Beginning in 1833, Voyage takes up the story of the future anarchist Michael Bakunin when his stage was still Premukhino, the Bakunin family estate, and Moscow under the repressive rule of Tsar Nicolas I, and when Michael and his four sisters, like many upper-class Russians of their generation, were in the thrall of German idealistic philosophy. I knew there were families, remarks his friend, the brilliant young critic Vissarion Belinsky. I come from a family. But I had no idea. But family life, with its passionate ties and conflagrations, all in the cause of exalted love and idealism, is left behind for ever when Michael at the age of twenty-six sets sail for Germany, waved goodbye by his newest friend, the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russian history, Alexander Herzen: the move from pure thought to revolutionary action is on the horizon.

Tom Stoppards provocative new play spans the recent history of Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution - but from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock n roll band came to symbolise resistance to the regime, and the British left, represented by a Communist philosopher at Cambridge.Rock n Roll premieres at The Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2006 and is part of the 50th anniversary programme.

I cant remember which side Im 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 Hapgoods 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 Stoppards Hapgood premiered at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in March 1988. It was revived at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in December 2015.