Word: stoppard
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...that, as Stoppard says, is a thought. James Joyce as I knew James Joyce, in Zurich in 1918: a myopic drunken Irishman; bloody pacifist. Or Lenin, a ripple in the seemingly endless stream of refugees and cafe plotters, writing Imperialism in the public library. Lenin as I knew Lenin. The Lenin I knew, or if memory serves, Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov: short, balding, desperate to lead the revolution finally taking place in Russia. A snowball in hell-wants to turn the civilized world into a standing committee of workers' deputies. Tom Stoppard's brilliant play Travesties opens with a dark Flander...
...second act is not as good, not as quick or as funny, tacked on as if Stoppard also needed to catch his breath. For one thing, he finds himself caught in his extended metaphor on The Importance of Being Ernest. For another, the second act is more concerned with Lenin, ably portrayed by Jack Bittner. But the speeches he gives are Lenin's own, and political bombast is only amusing in a very bourgeois sense. The act moves to conclusion inexorably picking up speed, and unifying it with the first act is Wood's tremendous performance as Carr. Finally...
...Stoppard, who also authored Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead has won himself another Tony. The Colonial show, a technically excellent production, is aided by the excellent cast, and in the end it's the play itself that shines, witty, exhilarating-Stoppard may be the most prolific writer of memorable epigrams in English since Pope. As for the questions he raises, there is something of the Dadaist in him-art for art's sake, and all-and something of an E.M. Forster English traditionalist. But revolutionary potentialities excite him, as they do most of the rest of us most...
...question of whether Stoppard can write a play that relies less on epigrammatical flash and more on substance still remains, however. Stoppard is only 38, still a young playwright, and Travesties must be looked on as an early work of genius. But it is genius, nonetheless; someday we may wonder why and how Stoppard went on, while the rest of us teach, work, play, lie in the cemetary up the hill in Zurich or under glass in the Kremlin...
...cast of the American Place Theater is able and energetic. Someone like Tom Stoppard - the real Tom Stoppard - might have turned such loans from other writers into dramatic capital of his own, making Isadora a kind of inspired, transcendental comic strip. For all his borrowings from his betters, Wanshel, however, has forgotten the one essential ingredient of good drama: the play wright's own voice...