Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Real Inspector Hound. Tom Stoppard has carefully avoided violating this unwritten but nevertheless universal truth. In the drawing room of Muldoon Manor (one fine morning in early spring) he arranges a collection of classic whodunit players. There is the lovely Lady Muldoon whose husband disappeared mysteriously over the cliffs 10 years ago, her bright young friend Felicity Cunningham; Simon Gascoyn, their dashing sometime lover who may be the madman police are searching for, a Muldoon half-brother confined to a wheel-chair and a creepy housekeeper named Mrs. Drudge who enters a room at all the wrong moments. A corpse...
...this time-worn situation Stoppard adds a hilarious and original twist: the cast includes a pair of critics, who watch the action with the rest of the audience. Their pre-curtain conversation begins the play and, as the evening progresses, they gradually get involved in the drama on stage, more so than reviewers generally...
...Stoppard's play "two of the most marginal characters in Shakespeare"--the pair of characterless spy-schoolfellows who conspire with Claudius against the Prince--occupy center stage, talking arguing and waiting while the action of Hamlet swirls incomprehensibly around them...
...with the disappointing exception of Hamlet himself, and selected routines evoke one show in the midst of another--notably, the first entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, in which the two, with more snap and individuality than such small parts would otherwise command, silently go through one of Stoppard's coin-flipping routines...
...rest of the play falls into place. And in the picture which it creates, Hamlet too takes on a clarity and reality than it could not realize if confined to Cain's relentless search for meanings in the unfathomably rich script. The "straight" interpretation of the Shakespeare that frames Stoppard's whimsy clashes oddly at times with the fanciful variations of Cain's direction, but no matter. This is what imaginative repertory ought to be--two plays that share everything and yet nothing, each distorting, reflecting, and illuminating the other...