Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...both plays, Stoppard's Dogg-speaking characters confront English speakers. These entertaining encounters owe much of their appeal, however, to the cast's versatility under the clever direction of Fred Pletcher...
INFLUENCED BY the philosopher Wittgenstein's theory of language, playwright Tom Stoppard developed Dogg, a dialect which uses the English language but assigns different meanings to each word. Stoppard teaches his audience Dogg in the first play of his pair, Dogg's Hamlet, and uses it to convey his point in the second, Cahoot's Macbeth. He writes: "the first is hardly a play at all without the second, which cannot be performed without the first...
...these plays, beauty of language, depth of character and universal truths of human nature are subordinated to the stately combat of conflicting points of view, whether about feminism and prostitution in Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1902) or about the moral impact of colonialism in Tom Stoppard's Night and / Day (1978). The excitement comes from hearing important arguments stirringly phrased: plays of ideas lend themselves more to epigrams than to cathartic resolutions, and typically end by depicting a withered landscape on which there are only losers...
After the initial voyeuristic thrill, Roeg's farce runs out of gas--and not only for lack of good lines. Unlike Tom Stoppard's dazzling Travesties, in which James Joyce and Lenin cavort without losing dignity, this film offends the myths it pretends to revere...
...Vienna (Amadeus). In Forman's American films an irascible individualist is forever butting his head against the walls of official power and getting bashed for his pains. These parables of dreams defeated hold echoes of tales from Forman's compatriots in dark absurdity, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera and Tom Stoppard. They are hardly the stuff of Hollywood dreams...