Word: stoppard
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...long profiles, originally published in The New Yorker, which reflect what the author calls "my abiding obsession with the skills that enable a man or woman to seize and hold the rapt attention of a multitude." His current choices: British Actor Ralph Richardson; Czech-born British Playwright Tom Stoppard; Johnny Carson, board chairman of the American talk show; Comedian and Movie Producer Mel Brooks; and Louise Brooks (no relation), film beauty and sex symbol of the 1920s...
...wrote in another context..." Elsewhere, after noting that he made last-minute cuts and transpositions in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, Tynan proudly quotes from one opening-night review: "As gay and original a farce as we have seen for years...
Tynan pays his respects to criticism in shrewd analyses of Richardson's performances and brief exegeses of Stoppard's plays. But mainly the author aims to please both his subjects and his readers. He is dazzled by Stoppard's stylish pessimism and flashy wordplay, yet wisely blocks him from the company of Beckett, Nabokov and Oscar Wilde. Deftly, Tynan puts his judgment of Stoppard in the book's foreword: "A uniquely inventive playwright who has more than once been within hailing distance of greatness." The piece itself is an adulatory delight, especially a scene in which...
...Stoppard, Muhammad Ali, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh and Howard Hiatt...
...magnet of the evening is Maggie Smith as Carson's wife Ruth. She seems to have slithered out of a Noel Coward comedy. Sophisticated, weary of it all, and restless, Ruth is given to brisk interior monologues, like "Help!" or "Watch it Tallulah!" Stoppard has given her a tasty collation of epigrams, and her delivery is succulent. Of her one-night London stand with Wagner, she notes that "hotel rooms constitute a separate moral universe." She develops a sensual fantasy crush on Milne and is heart-wrenchingly crushed when he is killed. Seductively comic, and amusingly seductive, Smith must...