On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage THEATRICS OF THE ABSURD by stefan kanfer For more than 20 years, Tom Stop-pard has been praised as an absurdist of major stature, a playwright who belongs in the company of Luigi...
...Petersburg...
...Hamlet is followed by The Real Inspector Hound...
...but comic...
...A maid, Mrs...
...Jumpers (1972) ostentatiously referred to Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Lewis Carroll, featured a chorus of gymnasts, and stressed that favorite theme of the undergraduate mind, Irony (a professor lectures on "Man—Good, Bad or Indifferent,'' while a corpse moulders in the next room...
...In 1990, judges at the Venice Film Festival obligingly jumped through the hoop, awarding it the Golden Lion...
...and David Pursley, doubling as a basso and a servant, conveys just the right Slavic tone...
...The gossamer of the '60s had turned into cobwebs in the '90s...
...Whenever I have complained about his oeuvre, defenders have invariably given me the same response: "Ah, well, you should have seen the English version...
...The leftover was made to recite ghastly limericks: "A Rumanian rhymer I met/ used a system he based on roulette./ His reliance on chance/ was a def' nite advance/ and yet...and yet...
...His enthusiasts assured me that there was a much better production at the Plymouth Theater on 45th Street...
...The maid opened Act Two by answering the phone: "Good afternoon, Ballantine residence...
...If Stoppard is borrowing an idea, he could at least improve upon it...
...The drama is supposed to occur in and around 19th-century St...
...It took more than two decades for the play to reach the screen, directed by the author himself...
...Birdboot is an overstuffed lightweight who bombinates about fidelity and integrity, but who, it turns out, is a vigorous seducer of leading ladies...
...One had reason to hope that the past was prologue, that the early Stoppard plays could now be interred in the Samuel French catalogue...
...Carrie Robert's costumes and James Morgan's scenery nicely expand the arena stage, aided by some canny lighting by Mary Jo Dodlinger...
...After all, the same can be said for the playwright...
...Nevertheless, Stoppard persisted, writing for the theater when he was not confecting such screenplays as The Russia House and Empire of the Sun...
...Kitty (Melissa Errico), the ingenue, anachronistically sings of her plight: "Four more years of girlish mystique and mystery/ then I'll be history...
...Moon is particularly disgruntled because no one cares for his opinion...
...Its true progenitors are Fiddler on the Roof and The Gypsy Baron...
...Acting students could perform them in the sanctity of their classrooms, far from midtown...
...Lady Muldoon and her houseguests are here cut off from the world, including Magnus, the wheelchair-ridden half brother of her ladyship's husband Lord Albert Muldoon, who 10 years ago went out for a walk on the cliffs and was never seen again...
...Or that Jeff Weiss as Claudius and Polonius, and David Healy as Marcellus, the Ghost, the Gravedigger, Osric, and Fortinbras, are busy without being virtuosic...
...and yet...' Lenin and Tzara were just as tedious—and once again Stoppard was hailed as a master of imagination and verbal acrobatics...
...I doubt that anyone could successfully set Tolstoy's many-layered tragedy to melody...
...But Mother Russia has no place in The Circle in the Square production...
...certainly the task is beyond the reach of novices...
...Obviously Stoppard, like many English youths, was force-fed Shakespeare at an early age...
...Ballan-tine's here, but he's got himself locked up in his study and don't want to be disturbed...
...If he was speaking of the novel, posterity has indeed proved him wrong...
...Drudge (Patricia Conolly), handles the exposition by answering the phone: "Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring...
...Healy is genial, but has more chins than laughs...
...Ballantine...
...Two reviewers, the second-rate Moon (Jones), and the first-string Birdboot (Healy), take their seats in a West End theater...
...I was in London when his most recent effort, The Real Thing, was playing at the Strand...
...everyone wants to hear from his newspaper's "real" critic, Higgs...
...both are so rigid and juiceless, they suggest a parody of Tolstoy's "wonderful, demonic" woman and the dashing lover who carries her away...
...They're having one last rehearsal before the big opening of her play tonight...
...But he was dull in a new way, and that made people think him great...
...Yes, Mr...
...But no...
...A good thing, too, for brevity is its sole virtue...
...It hardly seems worth mentioning that in the title role Simon Jones hoofs and puffs too much...
...His second greatest joy is seeing his raves reproduced in neon...
...He struck back with his fast-forward version of the tragedy, piling scene upon abbreviated scene, the characters stabbing, dueling, dying in a matter of seconds...
...This Hamlet is vulgar without being funny...
...Here he out-did himself with a supposed comedy about Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara, all of whom spent time in Zurich during World War I. One stage direction gives the flavor of the show: "The whole thing has been manic, and now it's finished, except that Joyce is a leftover...
...The participants blathered, and on one occasion sang, hilariously...
...Conolly is far better than the role she is required to fill...
...he was repelled by the idea of a married woman who forsakes reputation, home, child, and finally life because of an adulterous passion...
...And Errico's chirpy adolescent, a heartbreaking role in the book, is right out of a Jane Powell movie of the '40s...
...Fall they did, though, and Stoppard was encouraged to write the still more affected Travesties (1974...
...Stoppard established his overinflated reputation in 1967, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a precocious, chatty entertainment that had one insight: If you are Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, Hamlet is onlyawalk-on...
...Jones, who was self-effacing opposite Joan Collins in last season's Private Lives, is self-erasing here...
...Johnson's view of a contemporary poet: "He was dull, sir...
...This production made instant history, entering the record books as the most absurd musical adaptation since Lolita...
...The circumstances recalled Dr...
...When Higgs and I walk down this aisle together to claim our common seat, the oceans will fall into the sky and the trees will hang with fishes...
...Both men finally quiet down as the action begins...
...But most are the responsibility of director Theodore Mann: His touch varies between leaden and tinsel, and the country he puts onstage never evokes a region more Tsarist than the Russian Tea Room...
...the Manhattan Theater Club has decided to open its fall season with a revival of not one but two Stoppard comedies from the '70s, The Fifteen Minute Hamlet and The Real Inspector Hound...
...Ah, well, you should have read the English critics...
...The others seem to have graduated from the Hallmark school of poetry: Anna (Ann Crumb) and her lover Vronsky (Scott Wentworth) recalled their lyrical first meetings: "There you were/I had to be where you were...
...Coarse, yes...
...What value can there be," he wondered, "in all this aristocratic babbling...
...They called it "The Summarize Proust Contest," in which participants were challenged to encapsulate all of Remembrance of Things Past in 26 seconds...
...The chaps from Monty Python used the same premise with far greater effect and in about half the time...
...At last the man was beginning to catch up with his press notices...
...Some of the flaws in performance and interpretation could be blamed on miscasting...
...It seems astonishing that audiences fell for pseudoprofound monologues like this: "From here on the Darwinian revolu-tiondeclinestoitsown origins Man has gone ape and God is in the ascendant, and it will end as it began, with Him gazing speculatively down on the unpeopled earth as the moon rises over the smoking landscape of vulcanite cliffs and lakes of clinker—not the Herculaneum, but the ash itself...
...Eventually Moon and Birdboot move from the sidelines to become a part of the play they are watching...
...Only one song, "There's More to Life Than Love," displays any real originality or wit...
...This Hamlet is as advertised...
...Tchaikovsky never cared much for Anna Karenina...
...The Real Thing may have been tricked up by Director Mike Nichols, but au fond it was a guileful examination of writers, marriage, reality, and illusion...
...In the theater, however, hubris will always find a home...
...She's up at the theater on 44th Street...
...Most of his productions have been university twaddle, full of obvious puns ("my heart belongs to Dada") and pastiches of more talented artists, among them Shakespeare, Rene Magritte and even Agatha Christie...
...The play they are watching is a Christie-style mystery...
...There is much frantic capering on John Lee Beatty's set, as in the reduced Hamlet, with the same empty results...
...If the composer was thinking about making the work into an opera, or even worse, an operetta, then he was dead on...
...Before taps are sounded, it should be noted that as Anna's husband Ka-renin, John Cunningham underplays with intelligence and style...
...And so it is that with their maiden effort composer Daniel Levine and lyricist-adapter Peter Kellog give us Anna Karenina, the season's first misbegotten musical...
...In this slight piece Stop-pard pillories reviewers (a classic case of ingratitude, since they have all but canonized him) and lampoons the long-running Christie hit, The Mousetrap (that is also the name of the play within the play in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and don't think Stoppard doesn't milk every possible yock out of the situation...
...Both are knocked off by a killer whose surprising identity is revealed in the last seconds...
...Audiences failed to be impressed, and the movie's subsequent art house run was exceedingly brief...
...Alas, "promising" is not a word that attaches itself to the central efforts of Crumb and Wentworth...
...When no one could accomplish the task, the Master of Ceremonies awarded first prize to the woman with the largest bust...
...Trouble is, the gag was used 10 years before by Ira Levin in Critic's Choice, a Broad way comedy about (yes) a theater reviewer...
...Jerry Lan-ning is a splendid Stiva, Anna's brother, pompously and helplessly in love with love...
...Director Gloria Muzio has authentic talent?as evidenced by her work in Other People's Money a couple of years ago—and she is entitled to a mistake now and then...
...As the wicked Magnus, Weiss offers some industrial strength mugging...
...The tempo keeps increasing until the words and actions are barely intelligible...
...Stoppard followed R&G with several succes d'estime...
...On Stage THEATRICS OF THE ABSURD by stefan kanfer For more than 20 years, Tom Stop-pard has been praised as an absurdist of major stature, a playwright who belongs in the company of Luigi Pirandello, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett...
...I have never understood why...
...Some of Stoppard's satire is amusing enough...
...My presence defines his absence," Moon moons, with typical Stoppard logor-rhea, "his presence precludes mine...
...Curtain...
...Surprisingly, he learned his craft and attempted to wipe the smirk off his work...
Vol. 75 • September 1992 • No. 12
