Word: stoppard
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British Playwright Tom Stoppard chain-smokes ideas like cigarettes and emits the smoke with puffs of mirth. The latest display of his intellectual curiosity, verbal agility and quirky sense of humor is Jumpers (TIME, March 11), a comedy currently on view at Manhattan's Billy Rose Theater. Jumpers is a philosophical roller coaster careering dizzyingly along the parallel tracks of wit and logic over such subjects as the existence or nonexistence of God, the nature of good and evil, and the interdependence of ethics and metaphysics...
...CRITIC has to be a bit wary of these Tom Stoppard plays, since one of them puts a couple of critics right on stage and then draws them into the play. After that, some bad things--whose closer description might spoil Stoppard's beautifully elaborate plot--happen to them, so this critic at least is keeping one eye over his shoulder as he writes. I certainly have nothing against Tom Stoppards, who is the most original, witty and maybe even profound playwright to emerge in English for a decade. But I think he may have something against critics in general...
...general you can always take Stoppard to town philosophically. When the critics start to interfere with the play in Hound you might even get as far as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as you could wax sententious about discovering our own fantasies by acting them out, in the paradoxical and not-to-be-revealed ending of Magritte. But what is impressive is that all this is done so lightly, so cleverly, that it ought to embarrass the critic to get heavy about it. Stoppard's plots are so well devised, every funny line is so well ensconced in its context, that...
AFTER MAGRITTE, the short play which comes first, has the philosophical-absurd precision of Stoppard's latest work Jumpers. Jumpers is now being produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where the current Boston production also originated. There is a question of what was observed by several individuals at the scene of a crime, and the discussion of whether it was, say, a black minstrel with one leg or a white-bearded old man with a "seeing-eye tortoise" is pursued in tightly logical but ridiculous dialogue at which Robert Vaughn and Katherine McGrath, as a pair of entertainers just...
These goings-on may be taken as the kind of crazy crime and panachement that Stoppard displayed so well in The Real Inspector Hound. But the playwright also offers a long, rambling monologue by Dotty's rumpled husband, George Moore. Moore is a professor of moral philosophy. In his office opposite Dotty's bedroom, he is busy dictating a discourse in defense of moral absolutes -in fact, of the whole idea of goodness and even the possibility of God's existence. "Is God?" he begins. But soon he is revising: "Are God?" Before long, Moore has fumblingly...