Tom Stoppard
Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life review - the last word on a theatrical wordsmithWednesday, 07 October 2020![]() "The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the... Read more... |
First Person: Sam Yates on directing a Tom Stoppard play in real time via ZoomThursday, 30 April 2020![]() I am fortunate to have worked as a director in theatre, film, television and radio, and so it was hugely intriguing to be invited to direct an online reading of Tom Stoppard’s beautiful 1964 play, A Separate Peace.Here was a new form which... Read more... |
Leopoldstadt, Wyndham's Theatre review - Stoppard at once personal and accessibleFriday, 14 February 2020![]() It’s not uncommon for playwrights to begin their careers by writing what they know, to co-opt a frequently quoted precept about authorial inspiration. So it’s among the many fascinations of Leopoldstadt that Tom Stoppard, at the age of 82, should... Read more... |
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Old VicWednesday, 08 March 2017![]() To the list of abiding theatrical partnerships one must surely add Tom Stoppard and the director David Leveaux. From his Tony-winning revival of The Real Thing onwards to Jumpers and Arcadia, all of which played both London and Broadway, Leveaux has... Read more... |
Travesties, Apollo TheatreThursday, 16 February 2017![]() Tom Stoppard’s humungously funny play Travesties was born out of a piece of James Joyce doggerel about how a British diplomat sued him for the cost of two pairs of trousers. It’s like this. Joyce was organising an expat amateur production of Wilde’s... Read more... |
Travesties, Menier Chocolate FactoryWednesday, 05 October 2016![]() Is this the most dazzling play of a dazzling playwright? First staged in 1974, Travesties is the one which manages to squeeze avant-garde novelist James Joyce, Dada godfather Tristan Tzara and communist revolutionary Lenin into a story which... Read more... |
Hapgood, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 10 December 2015![]() A supposed Stoppardian footnote gets a first-class reclamation in Howard Davies's sizzling revival of Hapgood, the espionage-themed drama from 1988 that resonates intellectually and emotionally to a degree it didn't begin to achieve at a West... Read more... |
The Hard Problem, National TheatreThursday, 29 January 2015![]() Here's the genuine hard problem facing commentators confronted with Tom Stoppard's new play of the same name: how do you honour the legacy of this extraordinary writer's first play in nine years that also marks its director Nicholas Hytner's... Read more... |
Shakespeare in Love, Noël Coward TheatreThursday, 24 July 2014![]() “Comedy, and a bit with a dog.” That’s what audiences really want according to the hapless would-be impresario Mr Henslowe, and that’s certainly what they get in Lee Hall’s new stage adaptation of John Madden’s 1998 film Shakespeare in Love –... Read more... |
Arcadia, Tobacco Factory Theatres, BristolSunday, 06 April 2014![]() The popularity of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia owes a great deal to the play’s brilliant weave of themes and ideas, outlined by characters from two different historical periods – Romantic and modern. There is breathtaking brio in the way the writer’s... Read more... |
Live from the National Theatre: 50 Years on Stage, BBC TwoSunday, 03 November 2013![]() These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right... Read more... |
Arena: The National Theatre, Part One - The Dream, BBC FourFriday, 25 October 2013![]() How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live... Read more... |
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