stage matters / By William Kowinski

Full Stoppard: A cuckoo clock goes mad in Ashland

Playwright Tom Stoppard, who turned 70 on July 3, is having quite a year. After a triumphant run at Lincoln Center, his epic nine-hour trilogy, Coast of Utopia, won more Tony Awards than any drama in history. And his newest play, Rock ‘n’ Roll, is Broadwa

(July 12, 2007) In the OSF production of Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle, Weinberl (Rex Young, right) appears in the nick of time, as an astonished Zangler (Tony DeBruno, center) reacts and Christopher (Tasso Feldman) looks on. Photo by David Cooper.

Playwright Tom Stoppard, who turned 70 on July 3, is having quite a year. After a triumphant run at Lincoln Center, his epic nine-hour trilogy, Coast of Utopia , won more Tony Awards than any drama in history. And his newest play, Rock ‘n’ Roll , is Broadway-bound.

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He’s had other great years (it was his fourth Tony for Best Play) but in a recent interview Stoppard reiterated that as a playwright, “You don’t succeed unless you’re writing something that will be revived.” In a 1994 interview Stoppard named his 1981 farce, On the Razzle , as the play he most wanted done again. That the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of On the Razzle is one of their current season’s triumphs must add to this year’s satisfactions.

Beginning with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the late ’60s, Stoppard’s string of witty and intelligently madcap plays for stage, television and radio made him an international phenomenon. By 1981, this former theatre reviewer for provincial publications was living in a fashionable London district, in a house older than the United States. But his plays were about to change: first with a new infusion of emotion and more recognizable characters (particularly women) in The Real Thing (1982), and then combining this with historical depth and delicately rendered explorations of meaning in the subsequent plays ( Arcadia,Indian Ink , The Invention of Love , etc.), leading to his most recent.

But before he let go of the frenzied verbal gymnastics and headlong comedy, Stoppard powered those energies into the basic plot and characters from the 19th century Austrian playwright Johann Nestoy, and went On the Razzle — that is, on a heedless spree, a wide-eyed adventure — at full throttle: Stoppard running Wilde.

Which is not to say that this play is just a bag of puns and pratfalls. The puns and double entendres are certainly there (“Unhand my foot, sir!”; “I love your niece!”; “My knees , sir?” etc.), but there is no more exacting form than farce. It is a deceptively simple mechanism — you wind it all up in the first act, and let it spin wildly to its conclusion in the second — but it’s not easy to do. In all his plays Stoppard explores revelations from structure, so he was well equipped to create a classic farce.

The OSF production, as directed by Laird Williamson, understands this mechanism. Late in the play, a character complains of people running in and out of her house like a “cuckoo-clock gone mad.” This is the image the play begins with, as the actors take the stage with the jerky motions of cuckoo-clock figures in procession. The image also fits the place and period: 19th century Austria. A pompous provincial shopkeeper (played with a touch of W.C. Fields by Tony DeBruno) leaves his grocery store in the hands of two clerks while he goes to Vienna to propose marriage. But the clerks (Rex Young and Tasso Feldman) go to Vienna as well, for a last youthful adventure.

There are other complications involving a niece (Teri Watts) and her suitor (Shad Willigham), a comic servant (G. Valmont Thomas), the fiancée (Suzanne Irving) and her widow friend (Terri McMahon) and other characters. There are disguises, mistaken identities, role reversals, miscommunication and of course lots of coincidence in this good-hearted, fast-paced farce that relocates some of Nestoy’s satire (as in a brilliant speech about merchants) but basically provides one funny surprise after another.

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