Word: stoppards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...screenplay by Thomas Wiseman from his novel of the same name, with the collaboration of playwright Tom Stoppard, is not as subtly revealing of character as the direction and editing. In fact much of it is irritatingly banal--the few funny moments, presumably contributed by Stoppard, seem like the last-minute contrivances. Comic relief is pretty welcome during this film, though, no matter how forced it may be. When the wife and the gigolo finally fulfill their artificially arranged estiny by running off together, the husband tries to track them down. He notices that a mysterious car has been following...
TRAVESTIES. Playwright Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers) spews wit, wordplay, paradox and thought like tracer bullets, and, in a performance of indelible virtuosity, John Wood sees that every bullet is dead on target...
Exile, to some degree, is Stoppard's abiding theme. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is exile through ignorance. The two mini-heroes do not understand Hamlet or Elsinore. Junipers is exile from God. No one can clearly divine his purposes or verify his existence. Travesties is exile by intent, a rebellion against social traditions and aesthetic norms. Travesties, a play-within-a-monologue, begins with the age-frazzled Carr (John Wood) reminiscing intimately about the famed Zurich trio in a way that illustrates a perennial travesty: the ravages of time on memory. What follows is part vaudeville, part nonstop...
Stop-motion devices, relished by Stoppard, telescope, bisect or reverse the flow of time. The sound of a cuckoo clock, which Stoppard treats as the Swiss national anthem, periodically suspends the action, and the same opening lines of dialogue lead into an entirely different episode. One scene has Joyce arguing that no one would have been remotely aware of the Trojan War had it not been for Homer, a dozen other artists, and his own upcoming Ulysses. Scarcely a word is uttered without a play on it. A few of the puns are punishing, but most of the word play...
...thought it was the way to build a reputation, but the audience got tired of me." By 1967 Wood was tired too. "I thought I'd never find a playwright whose work I liked." Then he was sent Teeth, a television comedy by an unknown named Tom Stoppard. Wood played a cuckolded dentist who turned his rival's teeth green. Shortly afterward, Wood starred on Broadway in Stoppard's first stage hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Establishment again beckoned; the RSC had asked Wood four times before he agreed to join them. To his relief...