Tom Stoppard Plays 1: The Real Inspector Hound, Dirty Linen, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth & After Magritte
By (Author) Tom Stoppard
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
1st July 2005
15th January 1996
Main
United Kingdom
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
822.914
Paperback
224
Width 124mm, Height 198mm, Spine 15mm
180g
The author rounds off his brief introduction, giving the genesis of each piece, with the comment: 'The role of the theatre is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory'.
Leading off is The Real Inspector Hound, the ultimate country-house whodunnit; Dirty Linen moves a Whitehall farce to Parliament Square; Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth subverts Shakespeare; and After Magritte explains the inexplicable.
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