Word: stoppards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have made an interesting attempt to put Vladimir Nabokov's novel Despair on film. Anyone who has read the book might think that reconceiving the story in cinematic terms would be impossible--the tale relies on the reader's acceptance or disbelief of the first-person narrator's word. But Stoppard's conception is genius; only the delivery falls short of the mark...
EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOR by Tom Stoppard Music by Andre Previn...
...Stoppard were not a playwright, he would probably be a magician-or a card shark. He delights in illusions and confusions, puns and verbal crostics, taking away with his left hand what he has just given with his right. In Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, at Washington's Kennedy Center, he has taken his art to its immediate limit: the play itself is a trick...
...really crazy? The bestial Soviet state, obviously, and a system that officially turns the sane into the insane and pretends that its own insanity is rea son itself. As slyly as if he were pulling a rabbit from his hat, Stoppard has written a play as propaganda, and its anti-Soviet message is all the more effective for its wit and humor. Andre Previn's music, which he himself conducted, is equally witty. Hinting at Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Previn underlines Stoppard's words and adds his own notes of satire. When Alexander, for instance, says that confinement will...
...agitprop theater, the theater of propaganda and persuasion, Every Good Boy is a conspicuous success. By other dramatic standards, however, it is less satisfactory. Stoppard has always depended on gimmicks, but in his best work, like Travesties (1975), he has used them as a starting point to develop characters and situations. In Every Good Boy the gimmick has taken over, and the play ends where it began, with a brilliant conceit waiting to be developed...