Tom Stoppard -- Versatile Playwright and Wit

Tom Stoppard is widely regarded as our finest living playwright. His play are celebrated for the depth and subtlety of their philosophical and scientific inquiry, their historical awareness, their literary sophistication, their comic wit and their emotional impact. In this SDG, we will read - in chronological order - his nine most powerful and widely performed plays: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Jumpers; Travesties; The Real Thing; Arcadia; Indian Ink; The Invention of Love; The Hard Problem; and Leopoldstadt. These plays invoke writers as diverse as Shakespeare, James Joyce, and A. E. Housman, and treat such "hard problems" as the nature of consciousness, the randomness of human experience, the meaning of love, colonialism, quantum mechanics and the existence of God. We will also watch two films, Stoppard's own film of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,  and John Madden's film that was co-written by Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love.