Word: guildensterne
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...current production at the Boston Shakespeare Company (in rep with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) follows this creed wholeheartedly, quoting the above statistics in its program notes and approaching the play with an appetite for "deep meanings" that recalls the legend of the first-time viewer who exclaimed, "I don't know what everyone sees in this play--it's just a lot of cliched quotes strung together." A weighty interpretation is often provocative, even moving. But (the purist cries desperately), there must be a few subtleties of psychology or modernity that even Hamlet does not contain. And under...
...Spelvin is more than baffled. He feels a chill of apprehension, and rightly so, as he hears the stage directions: "The Executioner will be played by himself." When the curtain rises on curtain calls, Spelvin does not. This mordant conclusion echoes that of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Man is a simple soul inadvertently entangled in a blind mess called life with nary a clue as to its meaning and no aid from a Seeing...
DIRTY LINEN CLINGS to the American stage more pertinaciously than any other Tom Stoppard play--as if hanging on for life. While other, richer Stoppard plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or Jumpers tarried a brief moment in the spotlight and then scampered into classrooms to become "contemporary plays capable of being studied," Dirty Linen keeps rearing its head bashfully on the stage...
Written soon after the masterful Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Enter a Free Man shows us a different Tom Stoppard, a playwright who has curbed (somewhat unwillingly) his absurdist humor and created a sensitive portrait of a man waging a rather pathetic battle with society. The result, an uneasy balance of typical Stoppardesque repartee ("Look at the Japanese! The Japanese inventors are small...") and more down-to-earth pathos, neverthless works as a unit. Enter a Free man may not rank with Stoppard's prize-winning comedies, but it remains a warm and amusing play...
BETWEEN DIRTY LINEN and New-Found-Land, Stoppard has managed to fill out an evening of theater, even to make it entertaining. But there's so much more to expect from the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It's a bit sad to see a man who challenged Shakespeare to verbal duels wasting his time pulling blue panties out of his characters' pockets...