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Tom Stoppard

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Tom Stoppard (1937- Present) is a Czech-British playwright. He belongs to the genre of Absurdism, and his many plays explore various themes such as reality versus the stage, fate versus free will, chaos versus order, and time. He is most renowned for his plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Arcadia (1974), and Travesties (1993). He has won multiple awards for his plays, including an Academy Award and several Tony awards.

Tom Stoppard (born Tomas Straussler) was born July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czech Republic (Formerly Czechoslovakia). Due to the upcoming Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the shoe company that employed his father transferred the Straussler family to Singapore in 1939. However, upon arrival in Singapore, there was an invasion by the Japanese. 

Therefore, Stoppard, his mother, and his brother fled to India. Stoppard’s father stayed behind and died. In 1941, Stoppard and his family settled in Darjeeling, where he attended school. In 1946, Stoppard’s mother married a British army major, and they moved to England. Taking his stepfather's last name, he then became Tom Stoppard.

At the age of seventeen, Stoppard began work at the Western Daily Press as a journalist. In 1958, he was offered a position at the Bristol Evening World as a drama critic. Stoppard became acquainted with the director John Boorman at the Bristol Old Vic, a theater company. With an introduction to the world of theater, Stoppard began to write radio plays. 

His first stage play was written in 1960 as A Walk on the Water and was renamed and republished in 1968 as Enter a Free Man. Between 1962 and 1963, Stoppard began working as a drama critic in London for Scene Magazine. He was given the Ford Foundation grant, which allowed Stoppard to live in Berlin for five months and work on his Tony award-winning play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966).

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Arcadia

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