Word: sleuth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SLEUTH...
...known as the golden age of detective fiction at the same time that it cannily manipulates them. That golden age, as a line in the script defines it, was "when every Cabinet Minister had a thriller by his bedside, and all the detectives were titled." To fully enjoy Sleuth, it is necessary to have an indulgent affection for this minor literary tradition. Shaffer is shrewd with a plot turn and smooth with breezy characterization. But he asks us, as did Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie or any other reigning monarch of the golden age, to accept too much and think...
...situation is absurd, of course, and not made any less so because Shaffer knows it and to some extent plays on it. Surprise and considerable theatrical skill are what Sleuth offers; yet its surprises, harking back again to the golden age, are of a singularly artificial and engineered kind. Shaffer is a better writer by yards than, say, Christie; yet Sleuth is finally undone by the same problems as beset those musty standards, Ten Little Indians or The Mousetrap. Such works tease and divert; yet there is always a feeling of having been a little cheated after the curtain falls...
...suspense and humor wane only when Sleuth's ambitious author. Anthony Shaffer, overshoots his thematic boundaries. Shaffer tries to make Sleuth a philosophical discussion of conflicting honesty and fantasy in his characters' self-images, but this serious speculation is distinctly out of place. At its best, from the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, the genre has recounted imaginary adventures of imaginary people, largely, ignoring the problems of real life. Fortunately the play's simplistic message about seeing ourselves as we really are rarely interferes with the progress from clue to clue...
COLONIAL THEATER. Sleuth at 7:30, mats. Thurs...