Plays by Tom Stoppard (Book Guide): Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound, Rock n Roll, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Travesties, Rough Crossing, On the Razzle,

Source: Wikipedia. Commentary (plays not included). Pages: 24. Chapters: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound, Rock 'n' Roll, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Travesties, Rough Crossing, On the Razzle, Indian Ink, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, The Invention of Love, Artist Descending a Staircase, Night and Day, Jumpers, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, After Magritte, In the Native State, Dalliance, Hapgood, Heroes: Le Vent Des Peupliers, Enter a Free Man, Undiscovered Country, 15-Minute Hamlet. Excerpt: Arcadia is a 1993 play by Tom Stoppard concerning the relationship between past and present and between order and disorder and the certainty of knowledge. It has been cited by many critics as the finest play from one of the most significant contemporary playwrights in the English language. Arcadia is set in Sidley Park, an English country house, in both the years 1809¿1812 and the present day¿1993 in the original production. The activities of two modern scholars and the house's current residents are juxtaposed with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier. In 1809, Thomasina Coverly, the daughter of the house, is a precocious teenager with ideas about mathematics well ahead of her time. She studies with her tutor, Septimus Hodge, a friend of Lord Byron (who is an unseen guest in the house). In the present, a writer and an academic converge on the house: Hannah Jarvis, the writer, is investigating a hermit who once lived on the grounds; Bernard Nightingale, a professor of literature, is investigating a mysterious chapter in the life of Byron. As their investigations unfold, helped by Valentine Coverly, a post-graduate student in mathematical biology, the truth about what happened in Thomasina's lifetime is gradually revealed. The play's set features a large table, which is used by the characters in both past and present. Props are not removed when the play switches time period, so that the books, turtle, coffee mugs, quill pens, portfolios, and laptop computers appear alongside each other in a blurring of past and present. Scene 1 opens on 10 April 1809, in a garden front room of a country house in Derbyshire with tutor Septimus Hodge trying to distract his 13-year-old pupil Thomasina from her enquiries as to the meaning of a "carnal embrace" by challenging her to prove Fermat's Last Theorem so he can focus on reading the poem "The Couch of Eros", a piece written by another character, Mr. Ezra Chater. Thomasina starts questioning why the jam in rice puddi