Seen from two career landmarks – his 80th birthday next July and this summer’s 50th anniversary of the premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Sir Tom Stoppard’s full-length plays fall into three neat strands. That debut play putting the courtiers from Hamlet centre stage was followed by two other literary riffs: Travesties (handbagging The Importance of Being Earnest) and Jumpers (trampolining from A J Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic).
Those linguistic fantasias gave way to contemporary-realistic reflections on journalism, theatre and science (Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, The Hard Problem), then literary-biographical variations on the lives of Byron (Arcadia), A E Housman (The Invention of Love), Alexander Herzen (The Coast of Utopia) and Václav Havel-Tom Stoppard (Rock ‘n’ Roll).
Content from our partners
