Word: stoppard
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AUTHOR: TOM STOPPARD...
...nearly a decade since a new Tom Stoppard play has been seen on Broadway, not because he hasn't been working or has lost his arch wit and narrative originality, but because commercial producers fear that his learned , tragicomedies demand too much of audiences intellectually and indulge them too little emotionally. Stoppard's Hapgood mingled a spy story, a love story, games of mistaken identity and reflections on physics, and has never had a major U.S. production. The same fate may well await his new play, although it is by far the best from any British writer in years...
...Stoppard, intrigued by these passive, undifferentiated non-characters, tries to reconstruct the drama of Hamlet from their point of view. He intersperses his own imagined dialogue with the actual text of Shakespeare's play, to create a fascinating new perspective on Hamlet, drama, the human condition and flipping coins...
...contrast, Ivan Briscoe, as the self-important, archetypal actor, the Player, enunciates his lines flawlessly. With this character, Stoppard takes a stab at the thesps of this world, and Briscoe's interpretation is a twist of the knife. He delivers a spirited portrayal of the unshakably dignified Player who doubles as pimp for a group of malnourished and talentless actors-cum-prostitutes...
...Turais's plans. The role of Dvornicek is necessary both to sketch and flesh out the lines this play keep crossing between a Noel Coward-style romp and a post-modern mockery. The first scene is the weakest and least lively, probably because it is the most "straight" and Stoppard's script seems confined at first by the boundaries he had set for himself. The show really begins in the second scene where the silly tunes become the perfect complement for the slippery dialogue. After a brief intermission the pace keeps up at a careless rate that borders...