Word: rosencrantzes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Seven years ago, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, British Playwright Tom Stoppard turned Hamlet inside out and seemed to prove that even for bit players, great tragedy has no silver lining. When critics inquired about the play's message, Stoppard averred that this is no age for message in the theater. "One writes about human beings under stress," he said, "whether it is about losing one's trousers or being nailed to a cross." To risk a play whose primary level was philosophical, he added, "would be fatal." In Jumpers, that is just the gamble...
JUMPERS Tom Stoppard's first full-length drama since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead could have been written by a pixilated Orwell, a tipsy Shaw or a sozzled T.S. Eliot sounding off on metaphysics in a disorderly pub. Jumpers is an intoxicatingly clever absurdist comedy, a philosophical disquisition on the existence of God and the nature of truth, good and evil. It is also monstrously difficult to pin down...
This dramatic aspect of riddle solving seems to have a special appeal for British Playwright Tom Stoppard. Much of his first play, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern Are Dead, had those two pitiably bewildered title characters trying to figure out what the devil was going on in the castle at Elsinore. His new playlets are dramatic trifles compared to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the longer and better one, The Real Inspector Hound, is highly diverting. (The brief curtain raiser, After Magritte, simply reduces the deductive process to a bundle of false clues that turn the characters, as well as the lines, into...
...other shortcoming of the production is its editing of the text. Stoppard's text ends on Horatio's speech from Hamlet, in which his remarks on "casual slaughters" echo exactly Rosencrantz's desperate confusion. The Loeb production ends with the speeches of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which do not succeed as well in tying the work together and in reemphasizing the strange kinship of Shakespeare's and Stoppard's worlds...
...point, the Head Player explains to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. "We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style." The Loeb Ex production has both energy and great style, creating a world of small, struggling men caught, as Stoppard shows us, facing the obscurity of their own lives...