Celebrated for his verbal acrobatics and madcap intellectual conceits, playwright Tom Stoppard first made his name in 1967 with the playful, breathlessly inventive "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", a play loosely related to "Hamlet" but with its feet firmly in the absurdist tradition of Beckett and Pinter. He consolidated his reputation with the philosophical whodunit "Jumpers" (1972) and the Wildean historical farce "Travesties" (1974). His first feature work was co-writing (with Thomas Wiseman) Joseph Losey's "The Romantic Englishwoman" (1975), adapted from Wiseman's novel. Though he
