Tom Stoppard

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 frantically scribbles as a bomb ticks in his pocket; a couple of cowboys, one being named Jasper Jones; a lion who’s banned from the Ritz; an Irishman on a donkey claiming to be the...

"Travesties" was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries – James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin – were all living in Zurich. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into...

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 homeland of Czechoslovakia just as Soviet tanks roll into Prague. When security forces tighten their grip on artistic expression, Jan is inexorably drawn toward a dangerous act of...

Culled from nearly twenty years of the playwright’s career, a showcase for Tom Stoppard’s dazzling range and virtuosic talent, The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays is 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.Includes:“The Real Inspector Hound”“After Margritte”“Dirty...

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...

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 to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky; and Alexander...

The Real Thing won the 1984 Tony Award for Best Play, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play, and the 1982 Evening Standard Award for Best Play. The Real Thing has sold nearly 20,000 copies in the US to date. The Real Thing was first performed in 1982 at The Strand Theatre in London, starring Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees and produced by Michael Codron. It was subsequently transferred to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway in a...

Grove is reissuing all of Stoppard’s backlist, including the books previously published by FSG, in new, beautiful, definitive editions.

Indian Ink is an expansion of Stoppard’s 1991 radio drama In the Native State , which was inspired by his childhood years in 1940s Darjeeling. A neglected gem in Stoppard’s oeuvre, Indian Ink is recapturing the attention of American audiences. It was recently revived in a 2015 production at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco directed by Carey Perloff. Perloff also directed an Off-Broadway production at the Laura Pels Theatre in 2014, featuring Rosemary Harris, Romola...

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...

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 to challenge Marx...

Night and Day was originally staged in 1978 at the Phoenix Theatre in London, directed by Peter Wood and starring Maggie Smith. The production moved to New York in 1979. The play was revised significantly for its revival at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco in 2002. Grove is republishing titles by Stoppard that were previously published by FSG (including Arcadia , Indian Ink , and The Real Thing ) and updating our Stoppard backlist to give these books a fresh look. We are...