Word: stoppard
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...REPETITION of "heads or tails" in the opening scene of Tom Stoppard's Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead seems ironic, because the play is now worn like an old coin from passing through the hands of so many directors. Although it's been 16 years since its original minting, this weekend's Dunster House performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hasn't lost its edge. The innovation of two Shakespearean anti-heroes on center stage, the stark contrast between Elizabethan and modern language--and the themes of the finality of death, the role of fate and the insignificance of human life...
...Real Inspector Hound. Tom Stoppard has carefully avoided violating this unwritten but nevertheless universal truth. In the drawing room of Muldoon Manor (one fine morning in early spring) he arranges a collection of classic whodunit players. There is the lovely Lady Muldoon whose husband disappeared mysteriously over the cliffs 10 years ago, her bright young friend Felicity Cunningham; Simon Gascoyn, their dashing sometime lover who may be the madman police are searching for, a Muldoon half-brother confined to a wheel-chair and a creepy housekeeper named Mrs. Drudge who enters a room at all the wrong moments. A corpse...
...this time-worn situation Stoppard adds a hilarious and original twist: the cast includes a pair of critics, who watch the action with the rest of the audience. Their pre-curtain conversation begins the play and, as the evening progresses, they gradually get involved in the drama on stage, more so than reviewers generally...
Birdboot and Moon, as Stoppard has named the critics, have obsessions that dominate their thinking throughout the night. Moon is a second-string critic crazy with hatred for the first-string. "Perhaps he's dead at last, or trapped in a lift somewhere or succumbed to amnesia, wandering the land with his turn-ups stuffed with ticket stubs," he muses. Birdboot is interested only in ogling young starlets and keeping smut out of the theatre. Fulfilling what must be every playwright's ultimate fantasy, Stoppard uses the self-centered antics of these two to mock the whole business of theatre...
...curtain raiser (The Real Inspector Hound is quite short), the troupe performs Stoppard's equally delightful Dogg's Hamlet. This manic digest of all the famous lines from Hamlet sets the tone well for a lively, if light-weight evening. What with the Hamlet sword play and Inspector Hound's bang-em-up ending, we get a whole lot of corpses for our money...