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
Hapgood
, as well as at four other major plays (
Rosencrantz,
Jumpers,
Night and Day,
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as well as numerous unpublished scripts and variant texts of his published plays.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.