"Vintage Stoppard in its intelligence and wit." --VarietyIt is 1936, and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last--yet his memories are dramatically alive. Confronting his younger self from the vantage of death, Housman thinks back to the man he loved, who could not return his feelings, and considers the Oxford of his youth, suffused with the flamboyant influence of the Wildean Aesthetic movement and the restrictions of High Victorian morality. Winner of the Evening Standard's Best Play Award, The Invention of Love inhabits Housman's imagination as if a dream, illuminating both the pain of hopeless love and the passion displaced into poetry.

Anonymous
In Elizabethan England, political intrigue abounds as the Tudors and the Cecils battle it out over the succession of Queen Elizabeth I (Joely Richardson/Vanessa Redgrave), and the Essex Rebellion mobilises against her. Enter the dashing and wildly talented Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (Jamie Campbell Bower/Rhys Ifans), who not only fathers an illegitimate son in a clandestine incestuous relationship with Queen Elizabeth, but is also the secret author of the plays labeled with the name of William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall).

Shakespeare in Love
Young Will Shakespeare is the up-and-coming playwright of the time but has been disastrously struck by the bane of the writer's life - writer's block. His comedy "Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter" is not going anywhere and the playhouse is under threat of closure. What Will needs is a muse - and she appears in the form of the beautiful (and betrothed) Lady Viola. The path of true love doesn't run smooth for Will, however - Viola is engaged to be married to the insufferable Lord Wessex at the command of Queen Elizabeth. The joys and tragedy of his own life soon find their way onto the page in a moving, witty and spellbinding tale.

Let others sing of war and a hero buffeted by fate. I sing of marriage and a marriage bed, and the endurance of love. With an introduction by the author, this is Tom Stoppard in the voice of Odysseus's wife recalling how the Trojan War 'took away my husband for ten years, and ten more coming the long way home', and Odysseus's dramatic arrival back on Ithaca. Weaving Homeric tropes with the wry wit of a woman of our time, Penelope tells this still vibrant love story from the oldest poem in Western literature.

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.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard’s epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone. From one of today’s most acclaimed playwrights, Leopoldstadt is a human and heartbreaking drama of literary brilliance, historical verisimilitude, and powerful emotion.

Finally making its Broadway debut in a limited engagement run, Tom Stoppard's humane and heartbreaking Olivier Award-winning play of love, family, and enduranceAt the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone. From one of today's most acclaimed playwrights, Leopoldstadt is a human and heartbreaking drama of literary brilliance, historical verisimilitude, and powerful emotion.

I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all. Promising young playwright Will Shakespeare is tormented by writer's block until he finds his muse in the form of passionate noblewoman, Viola De Lesseps. Their forbidden love draws many others, including Queen Elizabeth, into the drama and inspires Will to write the greatest love story of all time, Romeo and Juliet. Based on Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's Oscar-winning screenplay, Lee Hall's stage adaptation of Shakespeare in Love premiered in July 2014 at the Noel Coward Theatre, London, in a co-production by Disney and Sonia Friedman Productions.

A new, beautiful updated edition of Tom Stoppard's best-loved play and one of Grove Atlantic's bestselling backlist titles, published with a new introduction by Tom Stoppard to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its debutRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the most enduring and frequently performed plays of contemporary theater and has firmly established itself in the dramatic canon. Acclaimed as a modern masterpiece, it is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm's-eye 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. Revised and reissued to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the play's first performance, this definitive edition includes a new introduction and previously unpublished ancillary material.

Tom Stoppard's reputation as a playwright was made when his dazzling debut, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, opened at the National Theatre. Fifty years later, the play's wit, stagecraft and verbal verve remain as exhilarating as they were in 1967 as the two ill-fated attendant lords from Shakespeare's Hamlet take centre stage, musing on the purpose of existence and its end. This new edition publishes to coincide with a fiftieth anniversary production at The Old Vic, London, and contains a new preface by the author.

"It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."--Tom Stoppard, Arcadia In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the "five hundred acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the Gothic style: "everything but vampires," as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard has arrived to uncover the scandal which is said to have taken place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park. Tom Stoppard's masterful play takes us back and forth between the centuries and explores the nature of truth and time, the difference between the Classical and the Romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life--"the attraction," as Hannah says, "which Newton left out."

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 institute, Jerry. Is the day coming when the computer and the fMRI scanner will answer all the questions psychology can ask? Meanwhile Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one. The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard premiered at the National Theatre, London, in January 2015.

In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sit Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the "500 acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the "picturesque" Gothic style: "everything but vampires," as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard has arrived to uncover the scandal which is said to have taken place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park.

Arcadia is a brilliantly inventive play that moves back and forth between centuries, populated by a varied and vastly entertaining cast of characters who discuss such topics as the nature of truth and time, the difference between the classical and the romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life—according to the author, "the attraction which Newton left out."

Only a year ago, the landowner Nikolai Ivanov was full of energy and optimism, in love with his wife and working hard. Now, for no reason he can understand, Ivanov is overcome with inertia and self-disgust. His wife is dying and he feels nothing. He is drowning in debt and despair, and he does nothing. Is it him? Is it Russia? And is the possibility of happiness with the young woman who loves him just a cruel illusion? Ivanov was the 27-year-old Chekhov's shot at despatching the 'superfluous man' of Russian literature, and in surrounding him with a brilliantly drawn set of provincial types he created some of the best comedy he was ever to write. Ivanov in this version was first presented by the Donmar Warehouse at the Wyndham's Theatre, London, on 12 September 2008.

It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories, however, are dramatically if confusedly alive. The river which flows through Tom Stoppard's play connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's early manhood where High Victorianism in art, literature and morality is being challenged by the Aesthetic movement and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst on to the London scene... The Invention of Love premiered at the National Theatre, London, in September 1997.

Flora Crewe, a young poet travelling in India in 1930, has her portrait painted by a local artist. More than fifty years later, the artist's son visits Flora's sister in London while her would-be biographer is following a cold trail in India.

The alternation of place and period in Tom Stoppard's new play (based on his radio play In The Native State) makes for a rich and moving exploration of intimate lives set against one of the great shifts of history, the emergence of the Indian subcontinent from the grip of Europe.

This fifth collection of Tom Stoppard's plays brings together five classics by one of the most celebrated dramatists writing in the English language.

Arcadia received the Evening Standard, the Oliver, and the Critics Awards, and
The Real Thing won a Tony Award.

"The Coast of Utopia", which can be enjoyed as a whole or as three separate plays, follows a group of young intellectuals from the country houses and cafes of the 1830s, through the European revolutions of 1848-9, to exile in London in the 1850s. The trilogy as a whole tells an epic story of romantics and revolutionaries caught up in the struggle for political freedom in an age of emperors.

In this meeting of two of the twentieth century's greatest playwrights. Tom Stoppard has reinvigorated Luigi Pirandello's masterpiece of madness and sanity. After a fall from his horse, an Italian aristocrat believes he is the obscure medieval German emperor Henry IV. After twenty years of living this royal illusion, his beloved appears with a noted psychiatrist to shock the madman back to sanity. Their efforts expose that for the past twelve years the nobleman has in fact been sane. With his mask of madness unveiled, the aristocrat launches an offensive to deflect their unwanted attention. While Pirandello's characters race linguistically about in Stoppardian dervishes, battling for the upper hand--and the greatest laughs--one question emerges: What constitutes sanity?

An Italian nobleman falls from his horse during a pageant. When he comes round, he believes he's the medieval German emperor, King Henry IV. For twenty years he lives this illusion but today a plot is being hatched to shock him out of this 'madness' and into the twenty-first century. Pirandello's Henry IV, in Tom Stoppard's new version, premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in May 2004.

Professor Leopold Nettles, the "hero" of Largo Desolato, is the author of a book that contains a troublesome paragraph laying him open to arrest on charges of "disturbing the intellectual peace." Pressed by the government to recant, Nettles is tor tured--by internal demons as well as external ones. Vaclav Havel has created a vivid and terrifying portrait of the writer in the totalitarian state that is as real and immediate as today's headlines.

Young Will Shakespeare has writer's block... the deadline for his new play is fast approaching but he's in desperate need of inspiration. That is, until he finds his muse - Viola. This beautiful young woman is Will's greatest admirer and will stop at nothing (including breaking the law) to appear in his next play. Against a bustling background of mistaken identity, ruthless scheming and backstage theatrics, Will's love for Viola quickly blossoms and insp

It is Tom Stoppard's very special skill as the master comedian of ideas in the modern theater to create brilliant, biting humor out of serious concerns. Virtually assaulting the audience with a cascade of words and a conspicuous display of intellect, Stoppard, in Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, contrasts the circumstances of a political prisoner and a mental patient in a Soviet insane asylum, to question the difference, if any, between free will and the freedom to conform. The situation, in which the mental patient hears an orchestra, is both chilling and funny as we are introduced to two men who happen to share the same name, are in carcerated in the same cell, and are attended by the same doctor.

Called an "extraordinary, epic drama of politics, persecution, and protest" (Nicholas de Jongh, The Evening Standard), Tom Stoppard's 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 dissent. Back in England, Jan's volcanic mentor, Max, faces a war of his own as his free-spirited daughter and his cancer-stricken wife attempt to break through his walls of academic and emotional obstinacy. Over the next twenty years of love, espionage, chance, and loss, the extraordinary lives of Jan and Max spin and intersect until an unexpected reunion forces them to see what is truly worth the fight. Both moving and funny, Stoppard's passionate tour de force explores a world of betrayals and hopes to find something lasting, true, and free underneath.