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...

Robert Feldberg, Record Drama Critic The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 05-24-1991 MODERN TRAVESTIES By Robert Feldberg, Record Drama Critic Date: 05-24-1991, Friday Section: LIFESTYLE / PREVIEWS Edition: All Editions -- Four Star B, Three Star P, Two Star, One Star OFF-BROADWAY ...

The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 09-29-2000 TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE -- PERU SHOULD FREE A POLITICAL PRISONER Date: 09-29-2000, Friday Section: OPINION Edition: All Editions -- Two Star B, Two Star P, One Star B NEARLY five years have passed since New Yorker...

The Law: Scooter Libby's prosecution has come to a sad close, with the jury finding the former White House aide guilty on four of five counts, including obstruction of justice -- in a case that never should have been tried.We'd like to think this verdict...

An Uzbek reporter for German broadcaster said Wednesday he faces up to 10 years in prison after being accused of defaming President Islam Karimov.Yuri Chernogayev said Uzbek prosecutors also charged him with tax evasion and "illegal dissemination of information threatening public security and order.""This is...

In the essay below, Billman explores the connection between art and history in Travesties: "Through his characterization of Carr, Stoppard yokes the roles of artist and historian … , affirming through Carr the importance of history and the individual 'making' it."

That self-referential art and self-indulgent revolution grow from the same soil is a proposition with which Tom Stoppard is familiar, and there are few modern playwrights who could bring a more formidable intelligence to bear on it. Stoppard's own plays—which are, almost all of them, plays within plays—grow from the demand that Art should be its own subject. At the same time politics provides their occasion, and no politics fascinates Stoppard more than that which has issued from the re...

[While] Tom Stoppard's Travesties focuses quite clearly on The Importance of Being Earnest, it may, judging by the early critical returns, serve even better as an example of "The Pitfalls of Being Witty." The play (which has as part of its donné the difficulties arising from a wartime production of Wilde's play in Zurich) has been hailed as a comic masterpiece, which it is, and as a vindication of James Joyce, which it is not. Centering his attention on the interaction of ...