Word: stoppard
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...these plays, beauty of language, depth of character and universal truths of human nature are subordinated to the stately combat of conflicting points of view, whether about feminism and prostitution in Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1902) or about the moral impact of colonialism in Tom Stoppard's Night and / Day (1978). The excitement comes from hearing important arguments stirringly phrased: plays of ideas lend themselves more to epigrams than to cathartic resolutions, and typically end by depicting a withered landscape on which there are only losers...
After the initial voyeuristic thrill, Roeg's farce runs out of gas--and not only for lack of good lines. Unlike Tom Stoppard's dazzling Travesties, in which James Joyce and Lenin cavort without losing dignity, this film offends the myths it pretends to revere...
...Vienna (Amadeus). In Forman's American films an irascible individualist is forever butting his head against the walls of official power and getting bashed for his pains. These parables of dreams defeated hold echoes of tales from Forman's compatriots in dark absurdity, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera and Tom Stoppard. They are hardly the stuff of Hollywood dreams...
...Front Page: raffish, even loutish, prone to sensationalism and cheap sentiment, but also truthful, keenly professional and dedicated to exposing wrongdoing in high places. Reporters have delighted in seeing themselves depicted as figures of quixotic integrity in plays ranging from the Broadway musical Woman of the Year to Tom Stoppard's rueful tragicomedy Night and Day. But the current wave of antipress feeling in the U.S. may have spread to Britain as well. Audiences at London's National Theater, which in 1972 staged an acclaimed revival of The Front Page, are cheering now for Pravda, a coruscating, comic attack...
...only McGoohan's automaton-like condescension seems unreal. Director Clifford Williams has sensitively evoked the rhythms of the play, which alternates between naturalistic bursts of action and spotlighted soliloquies. Much of the story is told after the fact, in an elegiac, ruminative tone, reminiscent of $ recent work by Tom Stoppard and Simon Gray. The epilogue leaves open the central question: When intimacy based on false assumptions still feels genuine, what does friendship mean...