Word: stoppards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
JUMPERS by TOM STOPPARD...
Seven years ago, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, British Playwright Tom Stoppard turned Hamlet inside out and seemed to prove that even for bit players, great tragedy has no silver lining. When critics inquired about the play's message, Stoppard averred that this is no age for message in the theater. "One writes about human beings under stress," he said, "whether it is about losing one's trousers or being nailed to a cross." To risk a play whose primary level was philosophical, he added, "would be fatal." In Jumpers, that is just the gamble...
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...
...REAL INSPECTOR HOUND by Tom Stoppard. A spoof of mystery thrillers and drama critics that is cleverer than Sleuth...