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One of England's most important playwrights, Tom Stoppard (born 1937) gained a wide international audience. His two great stage successes were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Thing, and his co-written screenplay Shakespeare in Love was...

[This entry was updated by Anne Wright (University of Sunderland) from her entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 366-388.] Tom Stoppard, a leading figure of the British theater since the mid 1960s, ranks as a dramat...

Tom Stoppard, a leading figure of the British theater since the mid 1960s, ranks as a dramatist of brilliant and original comic genius. His first major success established him as a master of philosophical farce, combining dazzling theatricality and wit w...

ON a demure Radio 4 quiz some years ago, I and other players were asked when we would like to have been born and to choose a historical character. Among the Charlemagnes and Cleopatras my choice was dull but absolutely true - the year...

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The rapper Jay-Z recently told a reporter that Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, the film that opened on Nov. 2 depicting the dazzling rise and precipitous fall of the 70’s Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas, compelled him to write “a back story to the story.”Jay...

Welterweight Zab Judah pulled a fast one on promoters and the media Wednesday, allowing his father, Yoel, to replace him on a conference call.Judah was supposedly publicizing his June 9 fight with undefeated WBA champion Miguel Cotto. The call lasted about 30 minutes, during which...

In the essay below, Delaney explores the intersection of life and art, genuine and ersatz love, in The Real Thing.

"There's something scary about stupidity made coherent," says Henry, hero of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, after one of his lover Annie's trendy-lefty effusions. There's something scarier about stupidity made a hit precisely because of its trendy-conservative effusions. If it weren't being praised without limit as a serious, indeed brilliant comedy by a writer who after years of cool and flashy wit finally has mastered character and feeling, The Real Thing&#...

It has sometimes been said of Tom Stoppard, by others besides me, that there is nothing going on beneath the glossy, slippery surface of his bright ideas and arch dialogue. With The Real Thing …, he has decided to confound his more skeptical critics by chipping a hole in the ice for us to peek through—under the proper conditions, no doubt, suitable also for fishing. You've probably heard by now what's swimming around this chilly pond. The "real thing" is Stoppard&#x...