Tom Stoppard

Two minor characters from "Hamlet" offer a novel view of the melancholy Dane.

The play begins with Max and Charlotte, a couple whose marriage seems about to rupture. But nothing one sees on a stage is the real thing, and some things are less real than others. Charlotte is an actress who has been appearing in a play about marriage by her husband, Henry. Max, her leading man, is also married to an actress, Annie. Both marriages are at the point of rupture because Henry and Annie have fallen in love. But is it the real thing?

"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...

Murder, marriage and metaphysics are the three elements that link the bizarre series of events in Tom Stoppard's high-spirited comedy, Jumpers. The protagonists include George Moore, an aging professor of moral philosophy whose quest to compose a lecture on 'Man--Good, Bad or Indifferent' is put on hold while he ponders the existence of his sock; his youthful wife Dotty, a former musical star on a downward spiral whose charm may explain the corpse...

"With his characteristically brilliant wordplay and extraordinary scope, Tom Stoppard has in Hapgood devised a play that 'spins an end-of-the-Cold-War tale of intrigue and betrayal, interspersed with explanations of the quixotic behavior of the electron and the puzzling properties of light' (New York Times). It falls to Hapgood, an extraordinary British intelligence officer, to try to unravel the mystery of who is passing along top-secret scientific...

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...

Tom Stoppard's stimulating, funny play Night and Day is set in a fictional African country, Kambawe, which is ruled by a leader not unlike Idi Amin. The nation is faced with a Soviet-backed revolution which quickly brings newsmen from around the world to cover the story. Using the characters Ruth; her husband, Geoffrey Carson, a mine owner; an Australian veteran reporter, Dick Wagner; and an idealistic young journalist, Jacob Milne, Stoppard pits...

"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 onetime lover, Spike; her boss, Leo; and the billionaire...

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,...

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...