Tom Stoppard
Exquisite: Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed
The Invention of Love opens with death. Tom Stoppard’s play about A.E. Housman starts on the banks of the Styx,…
The mystery of Huw Edwards’s missing phone
The best thing about being a playwright? The satisfaction of creativity. The worst? Press-night parties attended by friends, industry people…
Dazzling: Stoppard’s The Real Thing, at the Old Vic, reviewed
The Real Thing at the Old Vic is a puzzling beast. And well worth seeing. Director Max Webster sets the…
Rethinking Penelope
Problems about the misuse of history, especially on subjects such as race and colonialism, have been running for a long…
Why wealth matters in the free speech debate
The divide between the rich and the poor is obvious in Britain today. Whether in terms of income, geography or political…
Withdrawal symptoms
A TV play by Tom Stoppard, A Separate Peace, was broadcast live on Zoom last Saturday. I watched as my…
Family matters
History will record Leopoldstadt as Tom Stoppard’s Schindler’s List. His brilliant tragic-comic play opens in the Jewish quarter of Vienna…
‘I aspire to write for posterity’: An interview with Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard is Britain’s — perhaps the world’s — leading playwright. Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937,…
Show up and show off
The Edinburgh Festival was founded as a response to war. The inaugural event, held in 1947, was the brainchild of…
What stopped Stoppard?
Two programmes this week presented two radically different world views, or rather ways of life. Aditya Chakrabortty’s series for Radio…
Chance encounters
Some might say that Jeremy Corbyn is cloth-eared, tone-deaf, socially inept but on Monday morning, as the death of the…
Alice in cyberspace
Damon Albarn and Rufus Norris present a musical version of Alice in Wonderland. A challenging enterprise even if they’d stuck…
Barometer
Watching brief Samsung warned users of its voice-activated televisions that what they said in front of the TV could be…
All in the mind
Big event. A new play from Sir Tom. And he tackles one of philosophy’s oldest and crunchiest issues, which varsity…
High life
New York Hot money from China, India, Russia and Singapore is pouring into London; hotter money from the same countries…
‘Give people a break’
David Blackburn talks to Gwyneth Williams,who wants to revitalise Radio 4’s coverage of the arts
Stoppard territory
How many listeners, I wonder, actually tuned in to Darkside as it went out on air on Radio 2, after…
