Tom Stoppard is one of the most prominent British dramatists of the 20th century. Tom Stoppard started writing plays in the early 1960s, and gained recognition with his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1967, for which he won the Tony Award. Among his other works are The Real Inspector Hound (1968), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Hapgood (1988), The Invention of Love (1998), and the 3-play trilogy The Coast of Utiopia (2002). In addition to his impressive body of theatrical work, Stoppard has written screenplays for Brazil (with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown, 1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)?which he directed?and Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman, 1998), for which he won the Academy Award for best original screenplay.

Born Toma? Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1938, Stoppard was the son of Eugene and Martha Straussler. His father was a physician and employed by a shoe manufacturer, and in that capacity, the family was transferred to Singapore prior to World War II. In 1942 the Japanese attacked Singapore and Tom, his brother Peter, and his mother evacuated to India. His father remained briefly in Singapore and died shortly after his family had fled the city, when his evacuation ship was torpedoed in the Straits of Singapore.

The family settled in Darjeeling, where Martha managed a shoe store, and Tom and his brother began school. In 1946, his mother met and married Major Kenneth Stoppard, then serving in the British Army in India; Kenneth Stoppard took his new family to England, where they eventually settled in Bristol.

Tom Stoppard was educated in prep schools in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. At the age of seventeen he began working as a journalist for newspapers in Bristol, writing gossip, news stories, and theatre reviews. He became a freelance reporter in 1960, in order to devote time to playwriting. Within six years three of his plays and adaptations had received productions and his fourth, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, made his reputation: R&G received London and New York productions in 1967 and won the Plays and Players Award, the Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best new play.

Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, most of Stoppards plays are verbally intricate, very funny, and complexly plotted. As a playwright, he embraces a theatre in which plays can both tell stories and explore ideas about life and its complexity. Stoppards creative aim, writes Benedict Nightingale in the London Times is the perfect marriage of ideas and high comedy.

Arcadia, which Stoppard called a thriller and a romantic tragedy with jokes fulfills his aim quite completely. He had for some time been interested in chaos theory, having read James Gleicks Chaos in 1989, but he thought the concept, while interesting, was too dry and abstract. He began to develop the play, however, after reading Peter Quennells biography of Byron. Where I really kicked off, he recalls, was the classification between the classical and Romantic temperaments, or classical and Romantic anything else?which was mirrored by developing tastes in landscape gardening, with the Lord Byron theme emerging as a knock-on from that.

Stoppard originally wanted to call his new play Et in Arcadia ego, the Latin phrase mistranslated by Lady Croom in Scene One as Here I am in Arcadia. The phrase, which is found in Poussins painting The Arcadian Shepherds (c. 1636) on a tomb discovered by rustic shepherds. Even in Arcadia, goes the usual translation of the inscription found on the tomb, here I [Death] am?as if Poussins perfect, Utopian garden still had a place for death. Stoppard wanted the presence of death in the title, writes his biographer Ira Nadel, but brevity and box-office sense prevailed: death is now in the title only by imaginative extension, he confessed.

Arcadia was directed by Trevor Nunn and presented at the National Theatre in 1993. Stoppard received Londons Olivier Award for best play; the New York production won the 1995 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play. In both the UK and the US, Arcadia proved immensely successful with critics and playgoers alike. It is one of the playwrights most-produced works.

Tom Shafer and Andrew Rhoda

• Press Release
• What is Arcadia?
• Landscape Architecture
• Eric Van Tielen
• Gordon Strain
• People of the Production
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