Tom Stoppard's greatest stage hits – in pictures

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an absurdist riff on Shakespeare's Hamlet, made Tom Stoppard's name at the 1966 Edinburgh Fringe. Adrian Scarborough and Simon Russell Beale square up in the 1995 National Theatre production. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis

Diana Rigg rehearsing for Stoppard's Jumpers at the Old Vic in 1972. Rigg played Dottie, the ex-performer wife of a philosophy professor of (Michael Horden). Photograph: PA

Robert Powell in 1975's Travesties, an elderly man's reminiscences of first world war Zurich, where he met James Joyce as he wrote Ulysses, Tristan Tzara during the rise of Dadaism, and Lenin in the run-up up to the Russian Revolution. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

Actor Julian Bleach and the violinist Eugene Lee in a 2010 production of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a critique of Soviet clampdowns on dissidence, which Stoppard wrote alongside André Previn's score for full orchestra in 1977. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

A programme for the original 1978 production of Night and Day, Stoppard's satirical take on the British news media, starring John Thaw and Diana Rigg. Photograph: Alamy

Felicity Kendal in 1982's The Real Thing, the first of four Stoppard plays she starred in – the pair's close professional relationship developed into a personal one. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features

Arcadia (1992) featured Felicity Kendall, Bill Nighy, Harriet Walter and a young Rufus Sewell in its original cast. Here, the playwright's son Ed stars opposite Neil Pearson in the successful 2009 revival. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Rex Features

Paul Rhys and John Wood playing the young and old AE Housman in The Invention of Love at the National Theatre in 1997 Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis

Stephen Dillane and Douglas Henshall in Shipwreck, the middle third of The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard's 2002 play trilogy, also at the National Theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Sinead Cusack and Alice Eve in the 2006 Royal Court and West End smash, Rock'n'Roll, Stoppard's last original stage play – until now.
Photograph: Elliott Franks/WireImage/Getty Images