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Hilary believes fervently that consciousness is more than the sum of our biology. When she receives a position at a prestigious think tank, she develops a novel experiment to prove that humans are intrinsically altruistic, but the results are something she never anticipated. Includes a post-show discussion with Mark Tramo, a neuroscientist, neurologist, and musician who is a professor in the UCLA Schools of Medicine, Music, and Letters & Science. Recorded...

Comprising of three sequential plays, The Coast of Utopia chronicles the story of romantics and revolutionaries caught up in a struggle for political freedom in an age of emperors. The Coast of Utopia is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term 'intelligentsia' was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was...

The Real Thing is one of Tom Stoppard's most enduring and highly acclaimed dramatic works, first performed in 1982 at The Strand Theatre in London, starring Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees. 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....

In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the "five hundred acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the Gothic style: "everything but vampires," as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard...

From Tony Award-winning playwright Tom Stoppard, Indian Ink is a rich and moving portrait of intimate lives set against one of the great shafts of history-the emergence of the Indian subcontinent from the grip of Europe. The play follows free-spirited English poet Flora Crewe on her travels through India in the 1930s, where her intricate relationship with an Indian artist unfurls against the backdrop of a country seeking its independence. Fifty years...

Culled from nearly twenty years of the playwright's career, a showcase for Tom Stoppard's dazzling range and virtuosic talent, The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays is essential reading for fans of modern drama. The plays in this collection reveal Stoppard's sense of fun, his sense of theater, his sense of the absurd, and his gifts for parody and satire.

Above all don't use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science. The Hard Problem is a tour de force, exploring fundamental questions of how we experience the world, as well as telling the moving story of a young woman whose struggle for understanding her own life and the lives of others leads her to question the deeply held beliefs of those around her. Hilary, a young psychology researcher at the Krohl Institute for Brain Science,...

Tom Stoppers's play "Jumpers" is both a high-spirited comedy and a serious attempt to debate the existence of a moral absolute, of metaphysical reality, of God. The protagonists include an aging Professor Of Moral Philosophy -- trying to compose a lecture on "Man -- Good, Bad or Indifferent" -- while ignoring a corpse in the next room; his beautiful young wife, an ex-musical comedy Queen, lasciviously entertaining his university boss down the hall;...

It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories are dramatically alive. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the scholar and poet who is now the elder...

Alongside his many major plays, Tom Stoppard has written several highly acclaimed translations and adaptations of works by other writers, which are collected together here for the first time, together with a new introduction by Stoppard. Five European Plays includes adaptations of plays by four major European dramatists-Johann Nestroy, Arthur Schnitzler, Ferenc Molnár, and Václav Havel-Stoppard transports us to settings as diverse as nineteenth-century...