In one of our greatest contemporary plays, set in two distinct centuries, Tom Stoppard explores the nature of truth, time, sex and attraction with absorbing and tragic humour.Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in.Arcadia premiered at the National Theatre, London, 1993, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Pla...

The collected BBC radio productions of the internationally renowned playwright Tom StoppardOne of the giants of British theatre, Sir Tom Stoppard has been writing for the stage and screen for over 50 years. Full of wit, verbal brilliance and big ideas, his plays appeal to critics and audiences alike and are among the most studied works of the last century.Our collection contains the masterpiece, Arcadia, which won him an Olivier Award for Best Play...

“Stoppard is the master comedian of ideas in the English language.”—NewsweekCulled from nearly twenty years of the playwright’s career, The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays is a showcase for Tom Stoppard’s dazzling range and virtuosic talent, and essential reading for fans of modern drama. The plays in this collection reveal Stoppard’s sense of fun, his sense of theater, his sense of the absurd, and his gifts for parody and satire.

Tom Stoppard's take on the story of Penelope, in her own voice, published in pamphlet form with an introduction by the author.Let others sing of war and a hero buffeted by fate. I sing of marriage and a marriage bed, and the endurance of love.In this radiant prose-poem, Odysseus's wife tells of the long years awaiting her husband's return, and of his dramatic arrival back on the island of Ithaca.Weaving together the lush imagery of Homeric epic with a wryly...

The plays in this collection reveal in combination the 'frivolous' and 'serious' aspects of Tom Stoppard's talent: his sense of fun, his sense of theatre, his sense of the absurd, and his gifts for parody and satire. The author rounds off his brief introduction, giving the genesis of each piece, with the comment: 'The role of the theatre is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory'....

Hilary believes fervently that consciousness is more than the sum of our biology. When she receives a position at a prestigious think tank, she develops a novel experiment to prove that humans are intrinsically altruistic, but the results are something she never anticipated.Includes a post-show discussion with Mark Tramo, a neuroscientist, neurologist, and musician who is a professor in the UCLA Schools of Medicine, Music, and Letters & Science.Recorded before a live audien...

While attempting to discover the roots of Hamlet’s unhappiness, two courtiers go on a journey to plumb the depths of the universe’s mysteries. Tom Stoppard’s wildly inventive, Tony® Award-winning first play takes us through a tilted version of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy while casting new light on questions of fate, mortality and the meaning of existence.Recorded at The Invisible Studios, West Hollywood in June 2022.Directed by Rosalind AyresProducing Director...

Salvage is the final part of Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia. It is 1852. Alexander Herzen, who left Russia five years earlier, has arrived in London in retreat from a series of public and private calamities. Revolution in Europe has hit the rocks. 'I have lost every illusion dear to me,' he says. 'I'm forty. The world will hear no more of me.' But émigré circles in London (including Karl Marx) are buzzing with plots and intrigues, and Herzen's money, as well a...

One must strive a little for the epic, old boy.It's 1959 and Philippe, Gustave and Henri, three veterans from the first world war, dream of making their escape from the soldiers' home, if not to Indochina then at least as far as the poplar trees on the hill...Gérald Sibleyras's Le Vent des Peupliers premiered at the Wyndham's Theatre, London, in October 2005 as Heroes, an English-language version by Tom Stoppard. It received the Laurence Olivier A...

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play which, as it were, takes place in the wings of Hamlet, and finds both humour and poignancy in the situation of the ill-fated attendant lords. The National Theatre production in April 1967 made Tom Stoppard's reputation virtually overnight. Its wit, stagecraft and verbal verve remain as exhilarating as they were then and the play has become a contemporary classic.'One of the most original and engaging of post-war plays...

WINNER: OLIVIER AWARD FOR BEST NEW PLAY, 2020WINNER: TONY AWARD FOR BEST PLAY, 2023At the beginning of the 20th Century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna. But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered in the Merz apartment in a fashionable part of the city, Hermann's extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama. By the t...

Above all don't use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science.Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness?This is 'the hard problem' which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the instit...