Harris, his mother and his wife are a kooky trio. Enter the forceful inspector from Scotland Yard with his constable - which is strange, notes the wife, for she had ordered an ambulance. The officers proceed to place the three under arrest. It is not clear why; something about a parked car, a bunch of .22 caliber shells in the waste basket, and a robbery of the box office of a minstrel show. But Harris has an explanation: he had parked near an art gallery to let his mother see some paintings by Magritte in which her obsessional instrument, the tuba, figured grandly. But then it develops that there was no minstrel show at all, and the plot goes haywire. Performed in New York with The Real Inspector Hound.

The first major biography of the pathbreaking, perpetually influential surrealist artist and iconoclast whose inspiration can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé—by the celebrated biographer of Cézanne and Braque In this thought-provoking life of René Magritte (1898-1967), Alex Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte’s surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape, through such legendary works as The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) and his celebrated iterations of Man in a Bowler Hat. Danchev explores the path of this highly unconventional artist from his middle-class Belgian beginnings to the years during which he led a small, brilliant band of surrealists (and famously clashed with André Breton) to his first major retrospective, which traveled to the United States in 1965 and gave rise to his international reputation. Using 50 color images and more than 160 black-and-white illustrations, Danchev delves deeply into Magritte’s artistic development and the profound questions he raised in his work about the very nature of authenticity. This is a vital biography for our time that plumbs the mystery of an iconoclast whose influence can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé.

British playwright Tom Stoppard in his own words

Despite their box-office success, Tom Stoppard's plays have sometimes aroused academic hostility, his critics accusing Stoppard of cold intellectualism or frivolous showmanship. The purpose of this study is to examine the special problem of Stoppard's use of humor and games in conveying serious ideas. As an actor and director, Anthony Jenkins is concerned not just with the literary merit of Stoppard's plays, but also with the way they are written and shaped by the formal conventions particular to the media of stage, radio, and television. This book studies the stage space of each play as well as the actor's pauses and inner emotions. As a lecturer on drama, Jenkins follows Stoppard's career chronologically so that the radio and television plays are woven in with, and support various claims concerning, the major stage works. Unlike similar critical analyses of Stoppard's theater, this volume discusses all the latest plays, including The Real Thing, The Dog It Was That Died, and Squaring the Circle.

Tom Stoppard is justly famous for his innovative theatrical techniques. Daniel Jernigan argues that while much of Tom Stoppard's early work (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound, for instance) is postmodern, the remainder of his career essentially tracks backward from there--becoming "late modernist" in the 1970s (Travesties) and fully modernist in the 80s and 90s (The Real Thing and Arcadia). This pattern also makes sense of Stoppard's recent and uncharacteristic foray into dramatic realism with The Coast of Utopia (2002) and Rock 'n' Roll (2006), at which point the playwright seems to embrace the more straightforward rhetorical advantages of literary realism.

The fifteen essays in this collection, published here for the first time, survey the work of some of the major British and Irish dramatists since 1960. Included are four dramatists - Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer and Peter Nichols - who began writing plays before 1960, and whose work since then has continued to develop interestingly. Most of the dramatists considered here, however, are those who have begun writing more recently, and who illustrate some of the distinctive characteristics of British and Irish drama of our time.