Plays 4: Dalliance / Undiscovered Country / Rough Crossing / On the Razzle / The Seagull

tom stoppard

Dalliance
Undiscovered Country
Rough Crossing
On the Razzle
The Seagull This fourth volume of Tom Stoppard's work for the stage brings together five of his most celebrated translations and adaptations of plays by Arthur Schnitzler ( Dalliance and Undiscovered Country ), Ferenc Molnar ( Rough Crossing , a classic farce set aboard an ocean liner), Johann Nestroy ( On the Razzle , a mad chase through Vienna), and Anton Chekhov ( The Seagull , the classic Russian country tale). According to The Times of London, "Adaptation in Stoppard's terms means finding a sympathetic text and using it as a springboard for invention that leaves the original far behind." In adapting these plays--some classics, some nearly forgotten--for the modern stage, Tom Stoppard has added his own unique elements of dazzling wit and verbal brilliance, hilarious parody and cutting satire, to create works that stand as exceptional works of theater that do not belong to any one age.

Genres playsdramatheatre20th centurybritish literature

480 pages, Paperback

First published December 1,2000

This edition

Format: 480 pages, Paperback
Published: December 1, 2000 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780571197507
ASIN: 0571197507
Language: English

About the author

tom stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.