Word: stopparded
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DIRTY LINEN CLINGS to the American stage more pertinaciously than any other Tom Stoppard play--as if hanging on for life. While other, richer Stoppard plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or Jumpers tarried a brief moment in the spotlight and then scampered into classrooms to become "contemporary plays capable of being studied," Dirty Linen keeps rearing its head bashfully on the stage...
Just last year at about this time Ed Berman's British-American Repertory Company brought Dirty Linen to the Wilbur Theater in a production that amply demonstrated the play's waning interest. Stoppard's dramatic intellect is more versatile and thoughtful than most, but in Dirty Linen he delivers a simplistic homily on the rights and wrongs of public servants and the media, accompanied by comic fireworks. In his better plays they illuminate his themes in brilliant flashes; in Dirty Linen they simply forestall restlessness in the audience...
What was there to say about sex scandals that prompted Stoppard to write a whole play about them? That they are trifling things; that they have little or nothing to do with the quality of government; that they transcend party and ideology; that they sell newspapers. But Dirty Linen does not explore the psychology of public prurience, does not try to explain why people buy newspapers when they contain prying stories about politicians' private lives. In the play's epiphanic moment, a buxom secretary named Maddie Gotobed--the "Titian-haired, green-eyed" enchantress at the root of this particular scandal...
...know what I mean by a relatively free press? I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives." --African dictator Mageeba in Tom Stoppard's "Night...
...Thus Stoppard's extended metaphor of the decline of England may fail to carry the evening in the Winthrop JCR, but not without several moments of high comedy along the way. In the end, it is the snappy one-liners that we have come to expect from Tom Stoppard that shine through and send us away chuckling. After all, Britannia's 3000 miles away; as Linda suggests, maybe a sudden wave of loony patriotism will put a Rule Britannia clock in every home...