The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays

Tom Stoppard's masterpiece, with a beautiful new cover. <BR><BR>Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in.<BR><BR>Arcadia premiered at the National Theatre, London, 1993, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Evening Standard Award for Best Play.<BR><BR>'It is a laugh-filled tragedy about what happens if you take the intoxicants of poetry and science seriously. It is a play where Stoppard turns himself into a clown whose juggling balls are Romanticism, Classicism, and the meaning of life . . . The stale cliché about Stoppard is that he is a brilliant manipulator of ideas, but with no heart. Yet here - at the core of his best play - is the greatest love story on the British stage for decades. Yes, the characters bond over ideas - but some of the most interesting people in life do just that. That would be enough to make Arcadia a masterpiece - but it is even more than that. The play stirs the most basic and profound questions humans can ask. How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain - not just of ourselves, but of our species?' INDEPENDENT<BR><BR>'I have never left a new play more convinced that I'd witnessed a masterpiece.' DAILY TELEGRAPH<BR><BR>'A brilliant, brilliant play. A play of ideas, of consummate theatricality, of sophisticated entertainment and of heartache for time never to be regained.' SUNDAY TIMES

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna. But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered in the Merz apartment in a fashionable part of the city, Hermann's extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama. By the time we have taken leave of them, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and - for Austrian Jews - the Holocaust in which 65,000 of them were murdered. It is for the survivors to pass on a story which hasn't ended yet.<BR><BR>Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt was first performed at Wyndham's Theatre, London, in January 2020.<BR><BR>WINNER: OLIVIER AWARD FOR BEST NEW PLAY, 2020<BR>WINNER: TONY AWARD FOR BEST PLAY, 2023<BR><BR>Winner of the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play; the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play; the Drama League Award for Outstanding Production; and the Outer Critics' Circle Award for Outstanding New Broadway Play.<BR><BR>'One of Britain's greatest living playwrights to provide his most personal play yet.' The Times<BR><BR>'The news that Tom Stoppard has written a new drama ranks as top-end seismic activity.' Daily Telegraph

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play which, as it were, takes place in the wings of Hamlet, and finds both humour and poignancy in the situation of the ill-fated attendant lords. <BR><BR>The National Theatre production in April 1967 made Tom Stoppard's reputation virtually overnight. Its wit, stagecraft and verbal verve remain as exhilarating as they were then and the play has become a contemporary classic.