Overview
With a thirty-year run of award-winning, critically acclaimed, and
commercially successful plays, from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead" (1967) to "The Invention of Love" (1997), Tom Stoppard is arguably
the preeminent playwright in Britain today. His popularity also extends
to the United States, where his plays have won three Tony awards and
his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won the 1998 Academy Award for
Best Original Screenplay.John Fleming offers the first book-length
assessment of Stoppard's work in nearly a decade. He takes an in-depth
look at the three newest plays ("Arcadia", "Indian Ink", and "The
Invention of Love") and the recently revised versions of Travesties and
Hapgood, as well as at four other major plays ("Rosencrantz", "Jumpers",
"Night and Day", and "The Real Thing").Drawing on Stoppard's personal
papers at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center (HRHRC), Fleming also examines Stoppard's previously unknown play
Galileo, as well as numerous unpublished scripts and variant texts of
his published plays. Fleming also mines Stoppard's papers for a fuller,
more detailed overview of the evolution of his plays.
By considering Stoppard's personal views (from both his correspondence
and interviews) and by examining his career from his earliest scripts
and productions through his most recent, this book provides all that is
essential for understanding and appreciating one of the most complex and
distinctive playwrights of our time.