Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Playwright Paul Foster is not a newcomer to the stage. His Tom Paine (1968) enjoyed substantial popularity off-Broadway, particularly with younger audiences, thanks in part to Tom O'Horgan's flamboyant staging. In Marcus Brutus, Foster has followed Tom Stoppard's lead in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Just as R. & G. used Hamlet for its substructure, Marcus Brutus uses Julius Caesar...
...audiences around here it's probably less because its characters are like people we know than because so many plays recently have used the same sort of situation and devices (plays like Moonchildren and The Wager). What these plays have in common is the use of clever, Tom Stoppard-like dialogue as a facade, covering emotions that are revealed in a dramatic crisis. Paul Ableman is no Tom Stoppard, but his brand of collegiate wit keeps the surface of his play funny and entertaining...
...Real Inspector Hound is by Tom Stoppard, who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Paul K. Rowe '76, who usually writes this listing, saw it in London and wrote an article about how much he liked it, and no doubt if he hadn't absconded at the last possible moment and left me to fill his place you'd be reading enlightening details that radically increased your knowledge of British theater. But he did, so you won't Read the Scrutiny article instead, or check the Attica movie at the Orson Welles...
Lady in Distress. If any of us lives to see a more perfect embodiment of Sherlock Holmes than that offered by John Wood it will only be by some special dispensation of Thespis. Little known to U.S. theatergoers except for his Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Wood belongs among the top dozen actors of the English-speaking stage. His voice is an organ of incisive command. He moves with the lithe, menacing grace of a puma. In an instant, he can range from partygoer prankishness to inner desolation. At the core of his being...
Peter Barnes' The Bewitched (also playing in London) is as much of a pleasant surprise as Travesties was a disappointment. Barnes' work plays as fast and loose with history and biography as Stoppard's and is just as funny (though its humor is soaked in pain); Barnes even manages to get away with burlesque and still wind up with a powerful treatment of issues that really matter. His centerpiece is the misshapen, epileptic King Carlos V of Spain, the pitiful result of centuries of Habsburg inbreeding. For 35 years after his accession in 1665 he was expected...