Word: rosencrantzes
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...Stoppard's plays are situation comedies. He's always managed, in the past, to set things up at the 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...
...first full-length play, A Walk on the Water (about the family of a noninventive inventor), was produced on BBC television during the week of President Kennedy's assassination. "It wasn't the greatest week to have a comedy on," Stoppard recalls. Three years later came Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead-and fame. In view of the gentle, unassuming nature of Tom Stoppard's personality, fame is a word no weightier than a feather...
...over his shoulder as he writes. I certainly have nothing against Tom Stoppards, who is the most original, witty and maybe even profound playwright to emerge in English for a decade. But I think he may have something against critics in general, having once been one himself, before his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern broke on the London theater scene. Perhaps he shares reviewer-character Moon's jealousy of the first stringer who overshadows him, or reviewer-character Birdboot's moral outrage at other critic's criticism of his rather intense interest in a new actress each opening night. All I know...
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...