Tom Stoppard

English playwright, most famous for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Other plays include Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound, After Magritte, The Real Thing, The Invention of Love, Rock 'n Roll, Travesties, Jumpers, and Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth.

Also co-wrote Shakespeare in Love, Brazil and The Bourne Ultimatum, and is reported to have done uncredited dialogue rewrites on Revenge of the Sith and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Is often associated with the Theatre of the Absurd partially due to the general tone of his work and partially because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is essentially one big Shout-Out to the genre's codifier, Waiting for Godot.


 * Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
 * Arcadia


 * Author Appeal: Stoppard likes translation scenes like Quentin Tarantino likes feet.
 * Bastard Understudy
 * Bilingual Bonus: The opening lines of Travesties may seem like nonsense words, but when you sound them out it becomes a limerick in French introducing the speaker, Tristan Tzara, who actually used this technique of playing with sound and meaning in his own writing/performance.
 * Calvin Ball: The game of "Pontoon Bridge" in The Real Inspector Hound
 * Fictionary: Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth
 * Fun with Foreign Languages: Professional Foul, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth
 * Generational Saga: Rock 'n' Roll
 * Got Me Doing It: In Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, the protagonist spends the first act surrounded by Strange Syntax Speakers, and by the end of the act, they've got him doing it too. In the second act, he starts passing it on to other people.
 * Imagine Spotting
 * It Makes Sense in Context: The play 'After Magritte' starts with a surreal Magritte-like tableau. The rest of the play is the perfectly rational explanation for the tableau occuring.
 * Mind Screw
 * The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized
 * Scenery Porn
 * Show Within a Show
 * Spy Speak
 * Strange Syntax Speaker: Most of the cast in Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth
 * Straw Critic
 * Stylistic Suck
 * Tableau
 * After Magritte opens with a surreal tableau, the meaning of which is explained in the opening dialogue, and ends on another.
 * Taken to a logical extreme in The Coast of Utopia, where the characters are arranged like Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe for no real reason other than "looks cool".
 * Viewers Are Geniuses: By a dramaturg/English major for dramaturgs/English majors. Arcadia is written for math majors.