Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead put Tom Stoppard on the map in 1968, earning him a Tony for best play. He continued with much success: Travesties (1976 winner), The Real Thing (1984 winner), Arcadia (1995 nominee), and The Invention of Love (2001 nominee). Stoppard even won the 1998 Academy Award for his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. All this without ever attending a university! Artist Descending a Staircase is one of Stoppard's early plays (1972) and was specifically designed for a BBC radio broadcast. A whodunit murder mystery centering around three octogenarians and an audio recording, the play proves problematic when mounted onstage. Reviewing the 1989 Broadway production, The New York Times wrote, "The precision of [Stoppard's] wit is not consistently equaled by Tim Luscombe's staging
Prime Stoppard
