Word: stoppards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Theater critics and detective stories are the butt of the jokes (what could possibly be funny about play reviewers?) in Tom Stoppard's play-within-a-play-within-a-play, The Real Inspector Hound. Or maybe that's a play-outside-a-play-etc? It's immutable essence isn't esoteric (humph) but I dare you to understand the ending. It's a zany play by the author of Travesties and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Dudley House is producing The Real Inspector Hound tonight through Sunday at Lehman Hall...
...Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties sizzles in epigrams and bubbles with life for about another week at the Colonial Theatre in Boston. The Colonial is a superb playhouse, a child's conception of a theatre with gilt boxes and Michelangelo cherubs dancing on the ceiling. They've also got some $4.50 seats, and if you've missed the Tony winner for 1975--take your first chance and the Green Line down...
...second act is not as good, not as quick or as funny, tacked on as if Stoppard also needed to catch his breath. For one thing, he finds himself caught in his extended metaphor on The Importance of Being Ernest. For another, the second act is more concerned with Lenin, ably portrayed by Jack Bittner. But the speeches he gives are Lenin's own, and political bombast is only amusing in a very bourgeois sense. The act moves to conclusion inexorably picking up speed, and unifying it with the first act is Wood's tremendous performance as Carr. Finally...
...Stoppard, who also authored Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead has won himself another Tony. The Colonial show, a technically excellent production, is aided by the excellent cast, and in the end it's the play itself that shines, witty, exhilarating-Stoppard may be the most prolific writer of memorable epigrams in English since Pope. As for the questions he raises, there is something of the Dadaist in him-art for art's sake, and all-and something of an E.M. Forster English traditionalist. But revolutionary potentialities excite him, as they do most of the rest of us most...
...question of whether Stoppard can write a play that relies less on epigrammatical flash and more on substance still remains, however. Stoppard is only 38, still a young playwright, and Travesties must be looked on as an early work of genius. But it is genius, nonetheless; someday we may wonder why and how Stoppard went on, while the rest of us teach, work, play, lie in the cemetary up the hill in Zurich or under glass in the Kremlin...