A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • One of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights, drawing on a wealth of new materials and on many conversations with him. “An extraordinary record of a vital and evolving artistic life, replete with textured illuminations of the plays and their performances, and shaped by the arc of Stoppard’s exhilarating engagement with the world around him, and of his eventual awakening to his own past.” —Harper's Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love—remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences. Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Václav Havel. Having long described himself as a "bounced Czech," Stoppard only learned late in life of his mother's Jewish family and of the relatives he lost to the Holocaust. Lee's absorbing biography seamlessly weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful, and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man.

Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm’s-eve view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play. In Tom Stoppard’s best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, where reality and illusion intermix, and where fate leads our two heroes to a tragic but inevitable end. Tom Stoppard was catapulted into the front ranks of modem playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967. Its subsequent run in New York brought it the same enthusiastic acclaim, and the play has since been performed numerous times in the major theatrical centers of the world. It has won top honors for play and playwright in a poll of London Theater critics, and in its printed form it was chosen one of the “Notable Books of 1967” by the American Library Association.

Tom Stoppers's play "Jumpers" is both a high-spirited comedy and a serious attempt to debate the existence of a moral absolute, of metaphysical reality, of God. Michael Billington in "The Guardian" described the play succinctly: "The new Radical Liberal Party has made the ex-Minister of Agriculture Archbishop of Cantebury, British astronauts are scrapping with each other on the moon, and spritely academics steal about London by night indulging in murderous gymnastics: this is the kind of manic, futuristic, topsy-turvy world in which Stoppard's dazzling new play is set. And if I add that the influences apparently include Wittgenstein, Magritte, the Goons, Robert Dhery, Joe Orton, and The Avengers, you will have some idea of the heady brew Stoppard has here concocted." The protagonist incude an aging Professor Of Moral Philosophy -- trying to compose a lecture on "Man -- Good, Bad or Indifferent" -- while ignoring a corpse in the next room; his beautiful young wife, an ex-musical comedy Queen, lasciviously entertaining his university boss down the hall; her husband's specially trained hare, Thumpers; and a chorus of gymnasts, Jumpers.

Despite their box-office success, Tom Stoppard's plays have sometimes aroused academic hostility, his critics accusing Stoppard of cold intellectualism or frivolous showmanship. The purpose of this study is to examine the special problem of Stoppard's use of humor and games in conveying serious ideas. As an actor and director, Anthony Jenkins is concerned not just with the literary merit of Stoppard's plays, but also with the way they are written and shaped by the formal conventions particular to the media of stage, radio, and television. This book studies the stage space of each play as well as the actor's pauses and inner emotions. As a lecturer on drama, Jenkins follows Stoppard's career chronologically so that the radio and television plays are woven in with, and support various claims concerning, the major stage works. Unlike similar critical analyses of Stoppard's theater, this volume discusses all the latest plays, including The Real Thing, The Dog It Was That Died, and Squaring the Circle.

It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories are dramatically alive. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the scholar and poet who is now the elder Housman confronts his younger self, and the memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson—the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings. As if a dream, The Invention of Love inhabits Housman's imagination, illuminating both the pain of hopeless love and passion displaced into poetry and the study of classical texts. The author of A Shropshire Lad lived almost invisibly in the shadow of the flamboyant Oscar Wilde, and died old and venerated—but whose passion was truly the fatal one?

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, 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 one-time lover, Spike; her boss, Leo; and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.

Companion to the work of playwright Tom Stoppard who also co-authored screenplay of Shakespeare in Love.