Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - BBC RadioRosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Adapted for radio by Tom Stoppard.
As part of BBC Radio's celebration of the playwright's 70th birthday, Andrew Lincoln and Danny Webb star in Stoppard's new adaptation of his celebrated play. First staged at the Edinburgh Festival when the playwright was an unknown 29 year old, the play is famously set simply 'within and around the action of Hamlet' and has since been widely admired for its verbal wit and dramatic ingenuity, becoming a contemporary classic of British theatre.
An attractive young woman comes into a Dublin pub, and the local barflies try to impress her with ghostly tales. It turns out that the woman has the spookiest story of all. Playwright Conor McPherson (Shining City, The Seafarer) wrote The Weir when he was 26 years old, capturing the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright.
The Playwright's Muse is straightforward in structure, moving from playwright to playwright and coupling an intellectual essay on each with an interview. It is one of those books that one might assume to be primarily of interest to playwrights; but, on the contrary, Herrington's classy collection is a perfect bedside read for those who simply love the theater–and love learning how the lives of its artists affect its creation.
This is the first book to examine the working world of the playwright in nineteenth-century Britain. It was often a risky and financially uncertain profession, yet the magic of the theater attracted authors from widely different backgrounds--journalists, lawyers, churchmen, civil servants, printers, and actors, as well as prominent poets and novelists. In a fascinating account of the frustrations and the rewards of dramatic authorship, Stephens uncovers fresh information on the playwright's earnings, relationships with actors, managers, publishers, and audience, and offers a new perspective on his growing status as a professional.
Think you know Shakespeare? Think again . . . Was a real skull used in the first performance of Hamlet? Were Shakespeare′s plays Elizabethan blockbusters? How much do we really know about the playwright′s life? And what of his notorious relationship with his wife? Exploring and exploding 30 popular myths about the great playwright, this illuminating new book evaluates all the evidence to show how historical material—or its absence—can be interpreted and misinterpreted, and what this reveals about our own personal investment in the stories we tell.
