Word: stopparded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Broadway has long spoken in English accents, at first because audiences admired Britain's elegant actors and urbane playwrights, then because producers came to prefer works that had been pretested in London, where costs are cheaper and audiences perhaps more forgiving. In the early '80s, dramas by Tom Stoppard and Peter Shaffer dominated the Tony Awards for plays; while in the past few years, Trevor Nunn's staging and Andrew Lloyd Webber's melodies have provided the very definition of hit musicals. This year, though, a clog is developing in the transatlantic pipeline. While London offers the customary array...
...Stoppard, whose plays at minimum offer glorious wordplay and the shimmering surface of what seems to be Big Ideas, is at his funniest and saddest in Hapgood. This one is about physics, espionage, thriller novels, superpower paranoia, Star Wars technology, defectors, conflicts between work and homelife, and the possibilities for flimflammery in employing three sets of twins. The author's ardent anti-Communism seems to have evolved into a world- weariness reminiscent of John le Carre, in which the two camps of the cold war are morally equivalent players of a pointless, deadly game...
...problem, as always with Stoppard, is plot. Hapgood is either too much a thriller narrative -- replete with an elaborate opening chase sequence that deliberately recalls bedroom farce in its slamming of doors and dropping of trousers -- or not enough of one to offer any real surprises. Stoppard radiates ambivalence about the genre he has chosen. Again, as with Shaffer, redemption comes from the marvelous acting of Felicity Kendal as an intelligence agent painfully aware of her shortcomings as a mother, Nigel Hawthorne as a wise colleague and, above all, Roger Rees as the defector, who is also the secret father...
...must- see new musicals this year, but the London theater season does boast provocative plays by Peter Shaffer and Tom Stoppard...
...drawbacks in the Winthrop production of The Real Thing lie primarily with the script, a script which ironically won a Tony Award in 1982 when it hit New York. Though the play is contemporary and fast-paced, Stoppard relies too much on his wit and hardly carries his play beyond a well-ornamented series of love triangles. It may be thought-provoking, but with characters who scare each other with the first sound they make, it cannot be moving...