Word: stoppard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Written by Tom Stoppard...
ACTING is falsehood. Or so it is in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, in which a love-entangled quarter of theater people, so used to faking emotions on stage, cannot feel emotions off stage. They resort to biting wordplay that is done to the hilt in the polished but ultimately sterile Winthrop production...
...first scene establishes the play's mood of underlying despair and over-hanging wit. Max accuses his wife Charlotte of infidelity, disputing her claim that she has just returned from a Geneva art auction. Due to Stoppard's cunning, his ambiguous lines refer to either her new lover or her trip. "How's old Geneva then? Frank doing well?" "What?" Charlotte asks. "The Swiss Franc. Is it doing well?" They refuse to address the crisis at hand. Instead, Max digresses on apparently far-out topics which actually parallel the scene's conflict, a technique Stoppard uses and overuses later...
...following scene makes clear that the opening exchange comes from a play written by Henry (Alan Thomas). Characters and relationships overlap from Stoppard's play to the plays within: Charlotte is Henry's wife and plays her on stage; Max is Henry's friend and plays Henry himself. But this fusion of life and art deadens the characters' emotions and makes them self-conscious and evasive...
...Spielberg decided to take the manly course of growing up onscreen. Adapting J.G. Ballard's fictionalized memoir of his days spent scavenging for survival in a Japanese concentration camp, Spielberg and Playwright Tom Stoppard (Travesties, The Real Thing) do a reprise of the director's favorite narrative recipe. A child is separated from his parents, confronts adversity and is reunited with them. But here the child is not abducted by poltergeists < or locked in a De Lorean time warp. Young Jim (Christian Bale) loses his way because, in the tumbledown panic of escape from Shanghai, he reaches for his precious...