Stoppard: The Plays for Radio, 1964-1991

by Tom Stoppard

This volume A Separate Peace, Teeth, Another Moon Called Earth, Neutral Ground, Professional Foul and Squaring the Circle. It shows that Stoppard's writing for the small screen is comparable to his more celebrated stage work, as the masterly and timeless Professional Foul demonstrates. In his introduction the author briefly describes how the individual pieces came to be written and the circumstances of their original production.

Genres: Drama, Plays

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard was 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.

Reviews

[Glenn Hopp · Rating 5 out of 5]

These seven radio plays show great imagination and inventiveness, and two of them (Albert’s Bridge and Artist Descending a Staircase) are absolutely brilliant. I had the advantage of having audios of all of them but one. Following along in the text while listening makes for a great experience. Stoppard shows that radio drama can be an art form on its own, though unfortunately I don’t think he has written more than a few new plays for radio since 1983. A later edition of this book includes an eighth play, In the Native State.

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to hand it to Stoppard: he is inventive . Each of these plays for Radio incorporates its own production twists. Time shifts between present and past....in one case with the Old boys reunion lunch on stage at the same time as the end of school dinner with the same participants ...many years before. Apparently all of these plays were written for radio production and it's not clear to me whether the stage instructions were actually read out over the radio or just had to be conveyed by sound effects etc'. Though I do remember listing intent to radio serials as a kid and they worked really well because you were forced to use your imagination and that could prove very powerful. I look for some depth in Stoppard's work and though the dialogue was great in all, I really only found the depth in the latter plays in the book. For example, in Artist descending a staircase......with the questioning of modern art and personal relationships over a lifetime. Though I thought that Sophie had acquired the remarkable senses of the truly blind in an amazingly short time. I've been reading a few plays written in the 1950's and 60's but I think Stoppard is among the best, if not the best. Though, with these plays for radio he is clearly constrained by the medium...he nevertheless achieves a certain greatness. Four stars from me.

[Justin K. Rivers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stoppard's one of the great modern playwrights, of course, and he certainly loves radio. The format complements his wit and humor and playful, detailed allegories. The prize of this collection is his radio masterpiece "Artist Descending a Staircase," which tackles the artifice of perception and the "blindness" of radio in a way that is both moving and intellectually exciting. The other plays are of less consequence, though entertaining. It is "Artist," with all its clever secrets and sad reflections on art and life, that rises above the rest. Aided in no small part by the hidden presence of the sly ghost of Marcel Duchamp.

[Vendela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some brilliance, a lot of very clever dialogue (some too clever for his own good), a fair few endings that fall under "predictable tragedy". There's something very fatalistic about many of these, food for thought for literary scholars.