Edward Albee and Tom Stoppard: Playing on words

Edward Albee, left, and Tom Stoppard (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; Tony Cenicola;The New York Tim)

By Ben Brantley, International Herald Tribune, February 20, 2008

Do you know what it's like to be deeply, unbearably in love, all the while aware that you can never completely trust the object of your affection? I would wager that Edward Albee and Tom Stoppard do, almost to the point of delirium.

Don't misunderstand me. I have no intimate acquaintance with the personal lives of these dramatists. It's just that their ruling passion, jubilant and exasperated, proclaims itself publicly in pretty much everything they write, including their new plays of this season ("Rock 'n' Roll" from Stoppard, and "Homelife" and "Me, Myself & I" from Albee).

How could it be otherwise, when it's the most basic tools of their trade that they so adore? The faithless lovers of Tom Stoppard and Edward Albee are, in a word, words. Or to quote one of the interchangeable title characters in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," the 1966 play that made the young Stoppard famous: "Words, words. They're all we have to go on."

It is one of the livelier paradoxes of the English-speaking theater today that its two most dazzling wordsmiths are incurably suspicious of the language they ply with such flair. No other living playwrights give (and, it would seem, receive) more pleasure from the sounds, shapes and textures of their lavishly stocked vocabularies. And none is more achingly conscious of the inadequacy of how they say what they say.

This contradiction is not just an element of their style; it's the essence of it. It's what gives that distinctive, heady tension to their plays, the friction that sends the minds of receptive theatergoers into exhilarated overdrive. It is also what makes actors say that mastering these playwrights' ornate, fast-footed language requires the sort of hard study demanded by Shakespeare... [περισσότερα ΕΔΩ]