Word: stoppard
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ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD takes the little men of Shakespeare and transforms them into the little Every-men of Beckett. In his American debut, British Playwright Tom Stoppard, 30, offers an agile, witty play that snaps with verbal acrobatics and precisely choreographed dances of the mind, while coming heartbeat close to the pity and terror of mortality. In the title roles, Brian Murray and John Wood are phenomenal, and Derek Goldby's direction has tensile strength...
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD takes the little men of Shakespeare and transforms them into the little Everymen of Beckett. In his American debut, British Playwright Tom Stoppard, 30, offers an agile, witty play that snaps with verbal acrobatics and precisely choreographed dances of the mind, while coming heart-beat close to the pity and terror of mortality. In the title roles, Brian Murray and John Wood are phenomenal, and Derek Goldby's direction has tensile strength...
...feel that their existence is a cheat: "To be told so little to such an end-and still-finally-to be denied an explanation." Here and elsewhere, Stoppard comes perilously close to singing the self-pity blues, or life-is-a-dirty-trick. All men and women submit to fate, but they are not all Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns...
...Stoppard, 30, rather thinks they are: "Almost everybody thinks of himself as nobody. A cipher, not even a cog. In that sense, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are everybody. I feel that I am like that." A sense of dislocation and exile comes naturally to him. The son of a Czech doctor, Tom Stoppard was born Tom Straussler. The family moved to Singapore when he was two and his father was killed in World War II. Tom went to school and lived in Darjeeling, Calcutta, Delhi and Lahore before coming to England at the age of nine and taking his stepfather...
...Stoppard hugely enjoys honing language to the precision point. Nonetheless, a play that rides on words as heavily as does R. and G. ought to have rid itself of some. Even the tensile strength of Derek Goldby's direction cannot keep segments of the drama from dialogyness. There is nothing logy about Brian Murray and John Wood in the taxing title roles. Every shifting breeze of the play's moods crosses their faces: they can summon up anxiety, false courage, utter bafflement, and honest fear with a flick of the lip, or a twist of the torso. They...