Alongside his many major plays, Tom Stoppard has written several highly acclaimed translations and adaptations of works by other writers, which are collected together here for the first time, together with a new introduction by Stoppard.
Five European Plays includes adaptations of plays by four major European dramatists—Johann Nestroy, Arthur Schnitzler, Ferenc Molnár, and Václav Havel—Stoppard transports us to settings as diverse as nineteenth-century Vienna and the Czech Republic under communism. From the farcical humor of
Rough Crossing, which follows two playwrights on a cruise ship who are struggling to finish a musical comedy before the ship docks, to the tender story of love and secrets in
Dalliance, to the chillingly comic depiction of a writer working in Communist Eastern Europe in
Largo Desolato, the plays reveal Stoppard as a master of technique, whose language shines in these translations and adaptations just as brightly as in his other works.
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Tom Stoppard was born ‘Tomás Straüssler’ in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937 and moved to England with his family in 1946. Catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967, he has become recognized as a contemporary comic master, the brilliantly acclaimed author of The Real Inspector Hound, Enter a Free Man, Albert’s Bridge, After Magritte, Travesties, Dirty Linen, Jumpers, New-Found-Land, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Artist Descending a Staircase, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), and Rock ‘n’ Roll. He has also written a number of screenplays, including The Romantic Englishwoman, Despair, and Brazil. In 2017, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature.