Review
Stoppard in his new pared-down, updated, and racily colloquial adaptation, finds both the intellectual rigor and the dramatic momentum and presents us with a quirky hybrid that is eventually and essentially Stoppardello.” —David Gillard, The Daily Mail
“Here are two playwrights, both theatrical explorers of fragmented identities and slippery narratives, who like to conjure up philosophical surprises as if they were so many rabbits out of a hat.” —Ian Johns, The Times (London)
“Laughter and pain perfectly mixed with sanity and madness” —Paul Taylor, The Independent
“Tom Stoppard has preserved the simplicity of the Pirandello's dramatic line, and enhanced its humour. The complexity exists in both the original and reorganised versions” —A.C. Grayling, The Times Literary Supplement
"If ideas were flesh and all conception carnal, Tom Stoppard would be the sexiest writer of the modern stage." —Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Examiner
“The brisk, witty dialogue bears the Stoppard hallmark . . . a fusillade of surprise Stoppard twists.” —Robin Markwell, BBC
“Stoppard’s work invariably demands much from its audiences. . . . They will find themselves not just intrigued and enlightened, but also moved and enlivened, with all their switches flicked on and buzzing.” —Amy Reiter on Salon.com
--This text refers to the
Kindle Edition
edition.
About the Author
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is the author of Six Characters in Search of an Author and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.
Tom Stoppard was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. His early years were spent in Singapore, India and, from 1946, England, after his mother married an officer in the British Army. Leaving school at seventeen, Stoppard worked as a reporter in Bristol, before moving to London to work as a theatre critic and feature writer. During this period he began to write plays for radio and for the stage and published his only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon.
His first major success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, was produced in London in 1967 at the Old Vic after critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival. Subsequent plays include Enter a Free Man, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (with Andre Previn), After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink and The Invention of Love. His radio plays include If You're Glad, I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died and In the Native State. Work for television includes Professional Foul and Squaring the Circle. His film credits include Empire of the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which he also directed, Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman) and Enigma.
In August 2002 the Royal National Theatre in London premièred Stoppard's trilogy - Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage - three sequential self-contained plays that comprise The Coast of Utopia.
