Pirandello was a complex and bizarre man when it came to penning down personality narrations. His works on theatrical post-modern genres are not only mesmerizing but quite baffling at times.Henry IV is an engrossing masquerade about an actor/protagonist of a play who goes crazy after being knocke...
Rock ’n’ Roll is an electrifying collision of the romantic and the revolutionary. It is 1968 and the world is ablaze with rebellion, accompanied by a sound track of the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Clutching his prized collection of rock albums, Jan, a Cambridge graduate student, returns to his ...
Presented here is the kind of work one imagines a clever young Briton might write upon completing university and going down to London: playful, imaginative, zestful in its learnedness, and above all—did I say this already?—playful. Come to think of it, much of Tom Stoppard’s work may seem like it...
Enough people love this play that it presumably has some good qualities. But I just couldn't get past the snide, obnoxious characters, and the facile, frequently inaccurate treatment of science and math, which panders to the "science is just the product of fallible human impulses and, like, we d...
"Professional Foul" is a TV play from the late 70s. The main characters are professional philosophers, attending a conference on ethics in Prague. The central tension of the play concerns a humorless British moral philosopher who believes in unbreakable moral principles and a former (Czech) stude...
One of a series of titles first published by Faber between 1930 and 1990, and in a style and format planned with a view to the appearance of the volumes on the bookshelf. In this play, Stoppard parodies the philosophy lecturer, the detective thriller, the comedy of manners and the Whitehall farce.
Tom Stoppard’s magnificent trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, was the most keenly awaited and successful drama of 2007. Now “Stoppard’s crowning achievement” (David Cote, Time Out New York) has been collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author, and includes the definitive text used duri...
Tom Stoppard's first novel, originally published in 1966 just before the premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is an uproarious fantasy set in modern London. The cast includes a penniless, dandified Malquist with a liveried coach; Malquist's Boswellian biographer, Moon, who frantical...
He sat in the kitchen typing. Jane did not come home. He had to keep stopping, sometimes for many minutes between sentences, trying to reassemble forgotten conversations but able only to trace an outline of events in which he hardly believed any more. Lord Malquist had instructed him that the jou...
1. The CELL needs two beds. 2. The OFFICE needs a table and two chairs. 3. The SCHOOL needs a school desk. These areas can be as small as possible but each has to be approachable from each of the others, and the lighting on each ought to be at least partly controllable independently of the other ...
I am indebted to her for her kindness as well as her scholarship. Moreover, Dr Kelly is, with Henry Hardy, who also has my gratitude for our exchanges, the coeditor of the book which was my entry to the world of The Coast of Utopia, namely Russian Thinkers, a selection of essays by Isaiah Berlin....
But this is so. In March 1918 (I take the following information from Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce), Claud Sykes, an actor temporarily living in Zurich, suggested to Joyce that they form a theatrical company to put on plays in English. Joyce agreed, and became the business manager of The English ...