Word: stoppards
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
JUMPERS Tom Stoppard's first full-length drama since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead could have been written by a pixilated Orwell, a tipsy Shaw or a sozzled T.S. Eliot sounding off on metaphysics in a disorderly pub. Jumpers is an intoxicatingly clever absurdist comedy, a philosophical disquisition on the existence of God and the nature of truth, good and evil. It is also monstrously difficult to pin down...
...musical comedy star, is concerned about the sudden obsolescence of moon lyrics and sees "great breakage" ahead. Her own has apparently already occurred. She is receiving questionable mental therapy (and even more questionable physical therapy) from the vice chancellor of George's university. It is to Dottie that Stoppard entrusts what may be his fundamental conviction: that a world without absolutes will shortly breed moral anarchy; witness the behavior of the astronaut. It is the Dostoevskian proposition that in a world that has no God, anything is permissible...
...Stoppard pushes this and related theses with antic wordplay, inspired zaniness and crackerjack wit. The evening would sag in spots if it were not for Hordern. What might have been simply a caricature of an absent-minded professor emerges as a warmly affectionate portrait of the last living humanist. And Rigg is lovely to look at, especially in the nude, and to listen to as she delivers her lines with a resolute intelligence that seems to unbend the pretzel twists of thought...
This dramatic aspect of riddle solving seems to have a special appeal for British Playwright Tom Stoppard. Much of his first play, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern Are Dead, had those two pitiably bewildered title characters trying to figure out what the devil was going on in the castle at Elsinore. His new playlets are dramatic trifles compared to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the longer and better one, The Real Inspector Hound, is highly diverting. (The brief curtain raiser, After Magritte, simply reduces the deductive process to a bundle of false clues that turn the characters, as well as the lines, into...
Hound's action takes place in a theater on opening night. It is a spoof of an Agatha Christie thriller, and Stoppard handles it with prankish zest, though it lacks the urbane comic polish and spine-prickling tremors that Anthony Shaffer put into his Christie takeoff, Sleuth. The subplot concerns two drama critics who observe and comment on the play and eventually get actively drawn into it at no small risk. Here Stoppard is sly and wry, and one may guess that he views critics with bemused affection and subdued contempt...