The Plays of Tom Stoppard

Considered the greatest playwright of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Tom Stoppard has written an astonishing number of prize-winning stage plays, radio plays, film scripts, and literary adaptations. His themes range from existential crises, state repression, and revolutionary optimism and disappointment to the reverberations of history, the mystery of identity, the pitfalls of passion, and the operation of chance, time, and memory in our lives. Characterized by intellectuality, wit, and word-play, Stoppard's works also engage with science, philosophy, and art, which he sees as helpmates to our navigation of a chaotic world. As David Mason has written, "If there's an overarching political argument to Stoppard's life work, it is in opposition to the world's destroyers, in celebration of the makers, thinkers and lovers with all their flaws." Plays to be considered include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia, Rock 'n Roll, and Leopoldstadt.