Word: hounding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...beginning in an immediately interesting and inherently funny way--taking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of their Hamlet context and making an existential comedy out of their dislocation; writing the ultimate parody of a murder mystery play and having his onstage critics sucked into the action in The Real Inspector Hound; creating a Professor of Moral Philosophy who tries to disprove Zeno's paradoxes of motion with a real hare and a real tortoise in Jumpers. Up till now, formulas like these have served Stoppard well--his plays have uniformly been among the most intelligent, enjoyable and effective theater...
Says Stanford Criminal Law Professor John Kaplan, a former prosecutor: "I have a strong feeling that it isn't right to behave like a banana republic and hound the ex-leader. But I regret to say I would go ahead and prosecute. It's a very strong case of obstruction of justice." In fact, even before the latest tape disclosure, the Watergate grand jury had vigorously wanted to indict Nixon while he was President, but was persuaded by Jaworski only to name him an unindicted co-conspirator on the argument that he could only be prosecuted after leaving...
...suspicions of his own involvement, but the televised Senate hearings provide a flood of incriminating new revelations. From June 25 to 29, Dean tells the committee that Nixon knew about aspects of the cover-up as early as Sept. 15, 1972. Equally embarrassing: Dean discloses White House efforts to hound political "enemies...
...really enjoy it. I felt I was a critic by instinct, not by credentials. I kept thinking I only put into print what other people were saying in the bar during intermission." Nonetheless, he made amusing use of the experience later when he wrote The Real Inspector Hound (TIME, May 8, 1972), a caustic spoof of two rather addlepated drama critics flexing their cliches on an Agatha Christie-style mystery thriller...
...general you can always take Stoppard to town philosophically. When the critics start to interfere with the play in Hound you might even get as far as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as you could wax sententious about discovering our own fantasies by acting them out, in the paradoxical and not-to-be-revealed ending of Magritte. But what is impressive is that all this is done so lightly, so cleverly, that it ought to embarrass the critic to get heavy about it. Stoppard's plots are so well devised, every funny line is so well ensconced in its context, that...