Word: waughs
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Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Perhaps no plat has passed so quickly into the standard repertoire as Tom Stoppard's early masterpiece. If you've never seen it, you own yourself a treat, like the first time you read Lewis Carroll or Evelyn Waugh. R & G is an actor's showcase, and if the eponymous reads are any good-you should laugh from the beginning until the surprisingly, tender conclusion. The play is about two characters in search of a language and contains the most brilliant wordplay on the English stage (always rich in wordplay) since Shakespeare or at least Wilde...
Forbidden Fruit. Irish Playwright Sean O'Casey dismissed Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) as English literature's "performing flea," an acidulous comment that P.G. himself ("Plum" to friends) loved to repeat. But other writers, ranging from Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell to Bertrand Russell and Evelyn Waugh, recognized that Wodehouse was a good bit more. Waugh, an indisputable master of the comic novel, would reread his favorites from the Wodehouse canon every year, as some people go back for spiritual sustenance to Shakespeare or the Bible. "For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man, no 'aboriginal calamity...
...excess fur made into a sweater in Scotland. Of all the cemeteries across the country that vie for the Loved One's remains, probably none celebrate death so elaborately or expensively as the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery at Calabasas, which could have been the scene of Evelyn Waugh's novel; there dogs that belonged to Lionel Barrymore and Rudolph Valentino are buried, and religious rites are routinely performed at the funeral. One expensive plot is occupied by a goldfish, another by a quail...
...Wodehouse invented a plot and Waugh wrote a book round it, the result could hardly be more hilarious than this British mini-novel. The action involves the appointment of a feckless liberal politician as head of the ultra-conservative Porterhouse College at Cambridge University. When he proposes some changes-enrollment of women in the all-male college, for example-the faculty and staff staunchly resist...
Weldon turns this downbeat visit into a romp. Whenever self-pity threatens the characters, another flashback washes it away. If these juxtapositions of past and present sometimes seem too easily ironic, the novel's breathless pace discourages dawdling over flaws. Its humor is wicked, in the manner of Waugh, whose comedy was also of matters as well as manners. The characters' resiliency is not less heroic for taking wacky forms. As Weldon proved in Down Among the Women (1973), she loves her sex because, not in spite of itself. ∙Paul Gray