Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...simply because of the funny accents. A tale of modern-day British life frequently must convey a sense of national loss and social stagnation that is foreign to audiences and--much more damaging--all too often unexpressed by the actors. In the current Winthrop House production of Tom Stoppard's Enter a Free Man, this failure mars an otherwise enjoyable evening of theater...
Written soon after the masterful Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Enter a Free Man shows us a different Tom Stoppard, a playwright who has curbed (somewhat unwillingly) his absurdist humor and created a sensitive portrait of a man waging a rather pathetic battle with society. The result, an uneasy balance of typical Stoppardesque repartee ("Look at the Japanese! The Japanese inventors are small...") and more down-to-earth pathos, neverthless works as a unit. Enter a Free man may not rank with Stoppard's prize-winning comedies, but it remains a warm and amusing play...
...long profiles, originally published in The New Yorker, which reflect what the author calls "my abiding obsession with the skills that enable a man or woman to seize and hold the rapt attention of a multitude." His current choices: British Actor Ralph Richardson; Czech-born British Playwright Tom Stoppard; Johnny Carson, board chairman of the American talk show; Comedian and Movie Producer Mel Brooks; and Louise Brooks (no relation), film beauty and sex symbol of the 1920s...
...wrote in another context..." Elsewhere, after noting that he made last-minute cuts and transpositions in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, Tynan proudly quotes from one opening-night review: "As gay and original a farce as we have seen for years...
Tynan pays his respects to criticism in shrewd analyses of Richardson's performances and brief exegeses of Stoppard's plays. But mainly the author aims to please both his subjects and his readers. He is dazzled by Stoppard's stylish pessimism and flashy wordplay, yet wisely blocks him from the company of Beckett, Nabokov and Oscar Wilde. Deftly, Tynan puts his judgment of Stoppard in the book's foreword: "A uniquely inventive playwright who has more than once been within hailing distance of greatness." The piece itself is an adulatory delight, especially a scene in which...