The Real Thing

Tom Stoppard

ISBN 10: 0802127444 / ISBN 13: 9780802127440

Published by Grove, 2017

About this Item

Tom Stoppard?s characteristically self-aware play about performative love centres on the troubled marriage of Max and Charlotte, which transpires to be a play-within-a-play whose actors and creative team are each suffering their own fracturing, interconnected relationships.

Seller Inventory # 524532

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Real Thing
• Publisher: Grove
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802127444
• ISBN 13: 9780802127440
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play, this enduring and highly acclaimed dramatic work "brings head and heart, life and art together in an exhilarating way". (San Francisco Chronicle)

The Real Thing begins with Max and Charlotte, a couple whose marriage is on the verge of collapse. Charlotte is an actress who has been appearing in a play about marriage written by her husband, Henry. Max, her leading man, is also married to an actress, Annie. Both marriages are at the point of rupture because Henry and Annie have fallen in love. But is it the real thing?

Tom Stoppard combines his characteristically brilliant wordplay and wit with flashes of insight that illuminate the nature—and the mystery—of love, creating a multi-toned play that challenges the mind while searching out the innermost secrets of the heart.

The Real Thing is brilliant and heartfelt, an extraordinary theatrical exploration of marriage, fidelity, and the creative life.

About the Author

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.