Word: stoppard
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Broadway has long spoken in English accents, at first because audiences admired Britain's elegant actors and urbane playwrights, then because producers came to prefer works that had been pretested in London, where costs are cheaper and audiences perhaps more forgiving. In the early '80s, dramas by Tom Stoppard and Peter Shaffer dominated the Tony Awards for plays; while in the past few years, Trevor Nunn's staging and Andrew Lloyd Webber's melodies have provided the very definition of hit musicals. This year, though, a clog is developing in the transatlantic pipeline. While London offers the customary array...
...Stoppard, whose plays at minimum offer glorious wordplay and the shimmering surface of what seems to be Big Ideas, is at his funniest and saddest in Hapgood. This one is about physics, espionage, thriller novels, superpower paranoia, Star Wars technology, defectors, conflicts between work and homelife, and the possibilities for flimflammery in employing three sets of twins. The author's ardent anti-Communism seems to have evolved into a world- weariness reminiscent of John le Carre, in which the two camps of the cold war are morally equivalent players of a pointless, deadly game...
...drawbacks in the Winthrop production of The Real Thing lie primarily with the script, a script which ironically won a Tony Award in 1982 when it hit New York. Though the play is contemporary and fast-paced, Stoppard relies too much on his wit and hardly carries his play beyond a well-ornamented series of love triangles. It may be thought-provoking, but with characters who scare each other with the first sound they make, it cannot be moving...
...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...