Word: linen
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Just last year at about this time Ed Berman's British-American Repertory Company brought Dirty Linen to the Wilbur Theater in a production that amply demonstrated the play's waning interest. Stoppard's dramatic intellect is more versatile and thoughtful than most, but in Dirty Linen he delivers a simplistic homily on the rights and wrongs of public servants and the media, accompanied by comic fireworks. In his better plays they illuminate his themes in brilliant flashes; in Dirty Linen they simply forestall restlessness in the audience...
What was there to say about sex scandals that prompted Stoppard to write a whole play about them? That they are trifling things; that they have little or nothing to do with the quality of government; that they transcend party and ideology; that they sell newspapers. But Dirty Linen does not explore the psychology of public prurience, does not try to explain why people buy newspapers when they contain prying stories about politicians' private lives. In the play's epiphanic moment, a buxom secretary named Maddie Gotobed--the "Titian-haired, green-eyed" enchantress at the root of this particular scandal...
...play trips down a path paved with jokes on foreign phrases, sight gags with panties, and tongue-twisting lists of pub names. Stoppard's ear for the curious-sounding proper noun is responsible for many of Dirty Linen's laughs; but between this dependence on the odd British name and the peculiarly British obsession with both perpetrating and denouncing scandalous activity, the play poses special difficulties for American performers. The Winthrop cast meets its challenge with modest skill, and no pretense of doing anything more than presenting a funny play. The script plasters over its mediocre theme with superficially brilliant...
...DIRTY LINEN CONTAINS within it, like a diamond in a block of coal, a delightfully irrelevant two-man interlude entitled New-Found-Land. In the committee-room that the sex-scandal investigators have temporarily vacated, an elderly and a youthful Home Office bureaucrat deliver monologues to each other that epitomize stereotypical visions of England and America. The break is a welcome one. Keith Rogal as Bernard-- the senescent and near-deaf senior officer whose droning, endless tale of a five-pound bet with Lloyd George is by far the evening's funniest sequence-- turns hesitation into a form of comic...
...Found-Land trails awkwardly back into an epilogue to Dirty Linen, leaving everyone slightly disappointed. There are virtues in these plays, and New-Found-Land, especially, gleams with the special verbal artisanship that is Stoppard's genius. But there are so many better plays by this author that are as easily staged and as fully gratifying that Winthrop House's production seems like an act of needless mercy towards a play that deserves euthanasia...