Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Real Thing by Tom Stoppard. "I don't know how to write love," mourns Henry (Roger Rees), the playwright hero of Stoppard's new play. "Loving and being loved is so unliterary. It's happiness expressed in banality and lust." If Stoppard's other work (Jumpers, Travesties) can be seen as a series of dazzling games-word games, mind games, games the mind plays on itself, games of war and politics, the exasperatingly intricate game of life-The Real Thing announces itself as just that: a real, straightforward play about matters of the heart, one that...
...love another game? Of course. Can familiarity breed creative evasion? Indeed. And so Stoppard leads the spectator on a merry round of hide-and-seek. Any one scene may turn out to be from one of Henry's plays, or be staged in his mind; it may even be the real thing. And Stoppard is, as always, ready to forget about his juggling act long enough to give an entertaining lecture on politics, language, sex or music. (Henry much prefers the Supremes and Herman's Hermits to "this female vocalist person .. . called Callas in a sort of foreign...
...Like Stoppard, he is interested in shifting points of view: the characters as they were in 1976, as they were refracted in Mehta's novel, as they will be distorted in the movie. He is even more interested in the need of both the Old World and the New to convert the other infidel and to sleep with the rich, silly American (who, the play suggests, will go to bed with any winner). As in Plenty, Hare is weakest when trying to show how his people get from one point in their lives to a radically different...
Another trap in Stoppard's play is the confining of rich, mock-Elizabethan dialogue to a spare, absurdist setting--as critics have pointed out, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern draws heavily from Samuel Beckett's style. But director Kaplan perhaps tips the scales too heavily toward the absurd tradition. The stark stage, the sparse furniture are all there, and rightly so. But the Shakespearean tradition is just as important: Stoppard includes sizable chunks from Hamlet, and his own words show a penchant for language tricks...
...slowing down the fast-paced delivery. Kaplan might have reinforced the contrast inherent in Stoppard's play and done more justice to the Hamlet half. For the near-antithesis between the two voices, the Shakespearean prose and the Beckett-like, riddling repetitions, lead to the play's core: Hamlet's tragedy as seen from side-stage, through the Godot-like absurdity of two characters who are not the least bit heroic...