Playwright Tom Stoppard to present Maynard Mack Lecture

Prize-winning playwright Sir Tom Stoppard will deliver the 24th annual Maynard Mack Lecture on campus on Monday, Sept. 8, at 5:15 p.m. in the University Theatre, 222 York St.
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Prize-winning playwright Sir Tom Stoppard will deliver the 24th annual Maynard Mack Lecture on campus on Monday, Sept. 8, at 5:15 p.m. in the University Theatre, 222 York St.

The lecture — open to the public without charge — is endowed through the Elizabethan Club and is co-sponsored by the Beinecke Fellows Fund at Yale School of Drama.

This fall, Yale Repertory Theatre will open with a new production of Stoppard’s Arcadia, directed by the theater’s artistic director, James Bundy, dean of the School of Drama. 

Stoppard, a Czech-born British playwright, has written for television, radio, film, and stage. Among his most well-known plays are “Arcadia,” “The Coast of Utopia,” “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” “Professional Foul,” “The Real Thing,” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” He co-wrote the screenplays for “Brazil,” “The Russia House,” and “Shakespeare in Love.”

The winner of an Academy Award and four Tony Awards, Stoppard is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. Among the themes in his work are human rights, censorship, and political freedom. He has also translated many plays by other writers into English, including Slawomir Mrozek, Johann Nestroy, Arthur Schnitzler, and Václav Havel. His latest original radio production, “Darkside” (2013), has been written for BBC Radio 2 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love” in 1998 and Tony Awards for best play for “Travesties” (1976),  “The Real Thing” (1984), and “The Coast of Utopia” (2007), and also received a Tony Award for best revival of a play for “The Real Thing” in 2000. He has also been honored with a PEN Pinter Prize for “determination to tell things as they are” and a Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement. He was knighted in 1997 and received an honorary degree from Yale in 2000.

The Elizabethan Club administers the annual Maynard Mack Lecture, which brings to campus a distinguished theater practitioner to speak on a topic of his or her choice. The lectureship honors the late Maynard Mack, Sterling Professor of English at Yale, who was an eminent scholar and critic of Shakespeare, Pope, and other literary figures. 

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