Word: stoppard
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...over to the American Shakespeare Theatre's touring Othello--and be damned. For this glum and unimaginatively "straight" production, with the aid of a flamboyant English directorial hand, skews and disfigures the original play far more effectively than the most startling new metaphor or outrageous directorial noodling. Tom Stoppard could not have done it better...
...Stoppard...
That, in essence, is what Undiscovered Country is all about. The play is being given an ably acted, stylishly assured U.S. premiere by Connecticut's Hartford Stage Company. Britain's Tom Stoppard has provided his own idiomatic touches in one thoroughly civilized dramatist's salute to another...
...within it. Its techniques and its themes are essentially British, and I'm not sure the Brattle St. crowd is any better prepared for this than for Lulu. The best written part of the play, it seems to me, is Sir Flute's second-act monologue (which resembles Tom Stoppard's New-Found Land in a lower comic vein); here Wood seems to be speaking for himself, evoking the romantic America of Paramount and MGM: "You said all that pretentious rights-of-man nonsense, and then you went out and did it." With our hands on our guns...
...matador, the tale twister, the verbal bully who mesmerizes those onstage and in the audience with his endless conjury of felicitous syllables. He is the theater's grand gabby old man, the shaman, the incantator, who goes back to Aeschylus and forward to O'Neill and Osborne, Stoppard and Shepard. Put a spotlight on him, and the eloquence swells, the spell continues. He simply will not shut...