Word: stoppard
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Death is the theme of the play, and it could be said of Stoppard as Eliot said of another dramatist...
Some plays open windows; others open worlds. The excitement attending Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is that it is one of those rare plays able to open worlds of art, life and death. The sun of this drama is coruscating wit and laughter; its shade is melancholy death. Broadway may not see a more auspicious playwriting debut this season...
...Stoppard has chosen to use Hamlet as a metaphor for existence. Through his fable he marches good Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern blindfolded. They know little of their roles and less of themselves. In fear and trembling, they jolly their way to their doom. Every man does the same, Stoppard implies, for no man can divine the purpose of existence except to know that life is uncertain and death is sure...
They kill the time with intellectual vaudeville-puns, word games, syllogistic oneupmanship. As they do so, it becomes apparent that Stoppard owes fully as much to Samuel Beckett as he does to Shakespeare. R. and G. are transparent replicas of the two tramps who wait for Godot. But where Beckett's dialogue almost expires in pauses of resignation, Stoppard's lines pant with inner panic. Delivered with comic ardor at machine-gun speed, R. and G.'s interchanges combine mental verve with spiritual desolation. It is as if the quiz kids of Wittenberg U. found themselves desperate...
...California, the first Broadway curtain will rise on Dr. Cook's Garden, an Ira Levin melodrama about medical ethics, with Burl Ives, Screen Actor Keir Dullea (David and Lisa) and George C. Scott as director. From Britain, David Merrick is bringing a sure conversation piece: Playwright Tom Stoppard's existentialist upending of Hamlet, titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Another West End import is the adaptation of Muriel Spark's novel about a slightly bonkers Edinburgh schoolmarm, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The title role, perfected by Vanessa Redgrave, now goes to Australian-born Zoe Caldwell...