Four Plays for Radio: Artist Descending a Staircase / Where are They Now? / If You're Glad I'll Be Frank / Albert's Bridge

by Tom Stoppard

Three artists face changing times, students hold a twenty-fifth reunion, a truck driver recognizes his missing wife's voice on a telephone time service, and a painter works endlessly on a bridge

Genres: Theatre

150 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

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

[Dr G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything Stoppard writes is clever and pushes you into thinking more deeply about… well pretty well anything.
The first in this collection, Artist Descending a Staircase plays around with the genre of radio plays and sound effects; Where are they Now? is a perceptive piece about the effect of schools on students, an effect often quite different from what they themselves understand, especially after some time and at a school reunion; If You’re Glad I’ll be Frank plays with the recorded messages that used to be available on the old landline telephone services, and muses upon the lives behind the voices. Most importantly, it puzzles over how time differs from means of measuring time; Albert’s Bridge scrutinises the never-ending cyclical bridge-painting that occurs on a number of the world’s iconic bridges, with digressions to consider broken-step marching on bridges; work collegiality; and how society’s processes fit together.
All four works are stimulating; I only wish I could hear them as radio-plays.

[Kaethe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shakespeare is my favorite dead playwright, Stoppard is my favorite living one. When that horrible day comes in the (I hope) far distant future when Stoppard ceases to be, I'll have quite a dilemma.

I love wordplay, and Stoppard dives into the language like it's a giant pile of autumn leaves. He throws them around, he laughs, he wrestles with dogs and small children, he admires the many colors, and he never quits to take an allergy pill.

If You're Glad I'll Be Frank is one of my favorite titles of all time, by the way. Good old Gladys.

Library copy.