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5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here

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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 Star Wars: 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.

Works by Tom Stoppard with their own trope pages include:

Other works by Tom Stoppard provide examples of:

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.
Calvinball: 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
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.