Word: stoppard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIRTY LINEN CLINGS to the American stage more pertinaciously than any other Tom Stoppard play--as if hanging on for life. While other, richer Stoppard plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or Jumpers tarried a brief moment in the spotlight and then scampered into classrooms to become "contemporary plays capable of being studied," Dirty Linen keeps rearing its head bashfully on the stage...
Just last year at about this time Ed Berman's British-American Repertory Company brought Dirty Linen to the Wilbur Theater in a production that amply demonstrated the play's waning interest. Stoppard's dramatic intellect is more versatile and thoughtful than most, but in Dirty Linen he delivers a simplistic homily on the rights and wrongs of public servants and the media, accompanied by comic fireworks. In his better plays they illuminate his themes in brilliant flashes; in Dirty Linen they simply forestall restlessness in the audience...
What was there to say about sex scandals that prompted Stoppard to write a whole play about them? That they are trifling things; that they have little or nothing to do with the quality of government; that they transcend party and ideology; that they sell newspapers. But Dirty Linen does not explore the psychology of public prurience, does not try to explain why people buy newspapers when they contain prying stories about politicians' private lives. In the play's epiphanic moment, a buxom secretary named Maddie Gotobed--the "Titian-haired, green-eyed" enchantress at the root of this particular scandal...
...play trips down a path paved with jokes on foreign phrases, sight gags with panties, and tongue-twisting lists of pub names. Stoppard's ear for the curious-sounding proper noun is responsible for many of Dirty Linen's laughs; but between this dependence on the odd British name and the peculiarly British obsession with both perpetrating and denouncing scandalous activity, the play poses special difficulties for American performers. The Winthrop cast meets its challenge with modest skill, and no pretense of doing anything more than presenting a funny play. The script plasters over its mediocre theme with superficially brilliant...
David Dodds as Cocklebury-Smythe and Steven Ives as McTeazle, two M.P.s who arrive early for their committee meeting, kick off Stoppard's introductory exchange of foreign phrases somewhat awkwardly; these are strange lines to recite, and would benefit from a touch less caricature, a touch more natural ease. But both, along with their fellow committee members--played by Nick D' Arienzo, Anne Troy, and Tom Blumenfeld--quickly achieve a nice pace and a smooth ensemble, broken only infrequently by mistimed punchlines or fumbled bits of business with the many panties cluttering the stage...