Tom Stoppard

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 "five hundred acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the 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...

The Real Thing is one of Tom Stoppard's most enduring and highly acclaimed dramatic works, first performed in 1982 at The Strand Theatre in London, starring Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees. The Real Thing begins with Max and Charlotte, a couple whose marriage is on the verge of collapse. Charlotte is an actress who has been appearing in a play about marriage written by her husband, Henry. Max, her leading man, is also married to an actress, Annie....

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...

"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...

Comprising of three sequential plays, The Coast of Utopia chronicles the story of romantics and revolutionaries caught up in a struggle for political freedom in an age of emperors. The Coast of Utopia is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term 'intelligentsia' was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was...

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...

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...

Plagued by debt, tormented by writer's block and in desperate need of a new hit, promising new playwright Will Shakespeare finds his muse in the form of passionate young noblewoman Viola De Lesseps. Their forbidden love soon draws everyone, including Queen Elizabeth, into the drama, and inspires Will to write the greatest love story of all time: Romeo and Juliet. Based on the Oscar-winning screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in...

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,...

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,...