Word: stoppard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Real Inspector Hound is by Tom Stoppard, who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Paul K. Rowe '76, who usually writes this listing, saw it in London and wrote an article about how much he liked it, and no doubt if he hadn't absconded at the last possible moment and left me to fill his place you'd be reading enlightening details that radically increased your knowledge of British theater. But he did, so you won't Read the Scrutiny article instead, or check the Attica movie at the Orson Welles...
Lady in Distress. If any of us lives to see a more perfect embodiment of Sherlock Holmes than that offered by John Wood it will only be by some special dispensation of Thespis. Little known to U.S. theatergoers except for his Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Wood belongs among the top dozen actors of the English-speaking stage. His voice is an organ of incisive command. He moves with the lithe, menacing grace of a puma. In an instant, he can range from partygoer prankishness to inner desolation. At the core of his being...
Lenin is the focus of Act Two. His sealed train puffs out of Zurich and into Petrograd, and we watch, through Krupskaya's eyes, his years in power. Stoppard is chiefly interested in Lenin's views on art--we hear him passionately wonder why the young people only want to see the avant garde experimentalism of Mayadovsky and not good, solid Chekhov. The only art that could move Lenin to tears in his last years, Krupskaya tearfully recounts, was--and the spotlight falls on Carr once again playing it--the Appassionata sonata...
...Stoppard seems chiefly concerned, in Travesties, to explore the relationship between art and social class. The aesthetic theories associated with Tzara and Lenin-dadaism and socialist realism--are both attacks on the conventional bourgeois notion of art, though from different directions. Yet just as Tzara becomes as conventionally middle-class as a character in The Importance of Being Earnest, Lenin himself is only moved by the decadent art of Chekhov and Beethoven. Joyce, perhaps, offers another angle on the problem, but one not explored much by Stoppard, who leaves Joyce as a tweedy, limerick-spouting stage-Irishman and stock anti...
Peter Barnes' The Bewitched (also playing in London) is as much of a pleasant surprise as Travesties was a disappointment. Barnes' work plays as fast and loose with history and biography as Stoppard's and is just as funny (though its humor is soaked in pain); Barnes even manages to get away with burlesque and still wind up with a powerful treatment of issues that really matter. His centerpiece is the misshapen, epileptic King Carlos V of Spain, the pitiful result of centuries of Habsburg inbreeding. For 35 years after his accession in 1665 he was expected...