Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Just how rich and varied that middle range can be is shown by a sampling of recent openings in London. The best of the lot: Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard, whose brilliant 1993 Arcadia is still going strong in London (and opens on Broadway next week). Like Arcadia, Indian Ink interweaves two time periods and settings, in this case present-day England and 1930 India. Also like its companion piece, the new play is framed as a quest by a careerist academic who is loaded with data but doesn't have a clue. Here it's an American scholar researching...
...play glides cinematically among Indian scenes, Flora's letters home, the scholar's footnotes and reminiscences by Das' son and Flora's surviving sister (Margaret Tyzack) to create a tenderly comic rumination on the ironies of history and colonialism, of creativity and eros-all unexpectedly mellow for the pyrotechnical Stoppard. Art Malik catches Das' contradictory yearnings, caught up in India's independence movement yet in thrall to Dickens and all things English. Felicity Kendall wittily and poignantly plays the free-spirited Flora, who shows Das that only by being true to himself and his own culture can he find communion...
...believe in artists," said the hero of Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing. "I believe in singles." The joy and curse of Elton John's music is that every song on every album has eyes to be a hit single. These are super-productions, aural Busby Berkeley numbers, ascending an oratorical mountain to the sky-rocketing crescendo. And, on Made in England, they sound swell; there's heft and meaning in the songs--no throwaways. "Since I've been sober I've made three albums, and this is the best," he says. "Getting adjusted...
...author peels back a layer of threats, uncertainties, possible betrayals only to reveal another. It's such an elaborate process, you can almost forget that what you wind up with is an onion: something savory and shapely but rather slight. Which is to say, Hapgood isn't quite Stoppard in highest flight. And which is also to say, even low-flying Stoppard can soar and sweep impressively; he's a rare bird...
...sliding sets enhance a pleasing sense of a world turned slippery at the edges, and certainly much has slipped away geopolitically since the play premiered in London six years ago. Although Stoppard has modified the text slightly to presage the downfall of the Soviet Union, his characters continue to reflect the ironies of flawed vision in the world of surveillance. While the electrons dance, an empire crumbles...