stoppard's life & character analysis of Hound....by sharon
Stoppard’s Background. His life and works.
Tom Stoppard’s life
Sir Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. His father, Eugene Straussler was a doctor and his mother Martha Straussler had Jewish ancestry. The Strausslers had another son as well. When Hitler started the historical genocide, the Holocaust, the Stoppard family had to escape to Singapore. Tomas Straussler was only two years old then. The Holocaust took the lives of many of Stoppard’s relatives. In 1941, the family (except for Stoppard’s father) moved to India and Eugene Straussler remained in Singapore to fight the Japanese. He died. Martha Straussler then married a British Army Officer Kenneth Stoppard and the family went to England.
Tom Stoppard did not attend University. At 17, he left school to begin his career as a journalist and subsequently he moved on to become a freelance writer, a critic and now, as one of the most outstanding living playwrights.
He married Jose Ingle, a nurse, in 1965 and had two sons. In 1972 he divorced Ingle, marrying Miriam Moore-Robinson, (they divorced in 1992), the owner of a pharmaceutical company. They had two sons too. He left his wife for an actress Felicity Kendal, who acted in many of his plays. In 1997, knighthood was conferred upon him for his contributions to the British theatre.
Jumpers deals with the existence of God and the nature of goodness. The main plot is based on the investigation of the murder of a philosophy professor and the protagonist, another philosophy professor, George Moore’s preparation for a symposium on “Man- good, bad or indifferent”.
Travesties questions “whether an artist has to justify himself in political terms at all”. The play includes three historical figures: James Joyce, Lenin, and Tzara who are collaborating on a production of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), with score composed by Andre Previn, reflects his concern with the situation of political dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The play was inspired by a meeting with Russian exile Viktor Fainberg.
The Real Inspector Hound was written between 1961 and 1962, initially named The Stand-ins and later, The Critics. The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of the stereotypical “whodunit” thriller (with a striking resemblance to Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap) as well as of the critics watching the play, with their personal desires and obsessions interwoven into their bombastic and pompous review of the play, all of which is ingeniously presented in a play-within-a-play form. Hound explores the seemingly uninfringeable frontier between the stage and the audience.
The Real Inspector Hound: Character analysis
In The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard makes use of many cliché and stereotypical characters to ridicule the murder mystery genre as well as the competition to rise up the journalistic hierarchy. There is Simon Gascoyne, the indispensable womanizer of the play who is later replaced (within the play’s play) by Birdboot, another philanderer who is higher up in the journalistic hierarchy than Moon and is highly conceited (to the extent of bringing colour transparencies of a whole review that he has written and showing it to Moon who pretends to be interested in it). Birdboot reveals more about his womanizing the more he tries to deny it (“are you suggesting that a man of my scrupulous integrity would trade his pen for a mess of potage?! Simply because in the course of my profession I happened to have struck up an acquaintance……” pg 17-18). Birdboot and Simon are similar in their flamboyant ways, and both of them were immediately captivated by Cynthia the moment she appears, to the point that when Birdboot takes over Simon’s place in the play in the second run, there is a parallel between Birdboot and Simon’s dialogue and thoughts.
Mrs Drudge: I have come to set up the card table, sir.
Birdboot (wildly): I can’t stay for a game of cards!
Mrs Drudge: Oh, Lady Muldoon will be disappointed.
Birdboot: You mean…you mean, she wants to meet me…?
Mrs Drudge: Oh yes, sir, I just told her and it put her in quite a tizzy.
Moon is the second- stringer in his journalistic world and is anxious to replace Higgs, to the extent of contemplating killing Higgs. He is eventually killed by his stand-in Puckeridge and dies with admiration for the murderer who got away with everything, including the object of desire, Cynthia.
Felicity Cunningham, the “trim-buttocked” young actress and Cynthia Lady Muldoon the object of desire (of the men within the play and also of the men within the play’s play) are other examples of the clichéd and formulaic characters in the play. Mrs Drudge, the charwoman of Muldoon Manor, is a highly comical character (who can clean an entire drawing room but fail to notice a corpse lying behind the settee), whose purpose in the play is to, firstly, provide all the details necessary for the audience to figure out the plot of the play and also to overhear each of the characters’ threat to kill Simon Gascoyne such that each of the characters have a motive to kill Simon ( Felicity: “I’ll kill you for this, Simon Gascoyne!”). For instance, Mrs Drudge answers the telephone and basically gives the setting and creates the element of suspense and mystery within the play:
Mrs Drudge: Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring….this is all very mysterious and I’m sure it’s leading up to something…
Major Magnus is the crippled half-brother of Lord Muldoon who appeared all of a sudden. Magnus turns out to be the Real Inspector Hound ( in the play’s play) and also Puckeridge (in Moon & Birdboot’s journalistic world) in addition to being Albert ( in the play’s play), Cynthia’s husband who was thought to be dead.
The dead body creates suspense from the very beginning. It was not a “character” initially, but towards the end when Birdboot discovers that the corpse is Higgs, it becomes a character, and reveals Puckeridge’s plot to kill the first and second stringer.
Bibliography
* Fleming, John. Stoppard’s Theatre: finding order amidst chaos. University of Texas Press, Austin, 2001.
* Martin, Richard and Rudiger Schreyer, Mirror Images (Klara Hurkova)
* Delaney, Paul, e. Tom Stoppard in Conversation, article: Stoppard Refutes Himself, Endlessly by Mel Gussow.
* Billington, Michael. Stoppard The Playwright. Methuen. London and New York. 1987.
* Gwee, Li Sui, lecture notes: Stoppard: The Text
* http://www.curtainup.com//stoppard.html
* http://www.stage-door.org/authors/stoppard.htm
* http://members.tripod.com/~warlight/aysegul2.html
* http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/001/712cycbw.asp
Tom Stoppard’s life
Sir Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. His father, Eugene Straussler was a doctor and his mother Martha Straussler had Jewish ancestry. The Strausslers had another son as well. When Hitler started the historical genocide, the Holocaust, the Stoppard family had to escape to Singapore. Tomas Straussler was only two years old then. The Holocaust took the lives of many of Stoppard’s relatives. In 1941, the family (except for Stoppard’s father) moved to India and Eugene Straussler remained in Singapore to fight the Japanese. He died. Martha Straussler then married a British Army Officer Kenneth Stoppard and the family went to England.
Tom Stoppard did not attend University. At 17, he left school to begin his career as a journalist and subsequently he moved on to become a freelance writer, a critic and now, as one of the most outstanding living playwrights.
He married Jose Ingle, a nurse, in 1965 and had two sons. In 1972 he divorced Ingle, marrying Miriam Moore-Robinson, (they divorced in 1992), the owner of a pharmaceutical company. They had two sons too. He left his wife for an actress Felicity Kendal, who acted in many of his plays. In 1997, knighthood was conferred upon him for his contributions to the British theatre.
Jumpers deals with the existence of God and the nature of goodness. The main plot is based on the investigation of the murder of a philosophy professor and the protagonist, another philosophy professor, George Moore’s preparation for a symposium on “Man- good, bad or indifferent”.
Travesties questions “whether an artist has to justify himself in political terms at all”. The play includes three historical figures: James Joyce, Lenin, and Tzara who are collaborating on a production of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), with score composed by Andre Previn, reflects his concern with the situation of political dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The play was inspired by a meeting with Russian exile Viktor Fainberg.
The Real Inspector Hound was written between 1961 and 1962, initially named The Stand-ins and later, The Critics. The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of the stereotypical “whodunit” thriller (with a striking resemblance to Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap) as well as of the critics watching the play, with their personal desires and obsessions interwoven into their bombastic and pompous review of the play, all of which is ingeniously presented in a play-within-a-play form. Hound explores the seemingly uninfringeable frontier between the stage and the audience.
The Real Inspector Hound: Character analysis
In The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard makes use of many cliché and stereotypical characters to ridicule the murder mystery genre as well as the competition to rise up the journalistic hierarchy. There is Simon Gascoyne, the indispensable womanizer of the play who is later replaced (within the play’s play) by Birdboot, another philanderer who is higher up in the journalistic hierarchy than Moon and is highly conceited (to the extent of bringing colour transparencies of a whole review that he has written and showing it to Moon who pretends to be interested in it). Birdboot reveals more about his womanizing the more he tries to deny it (“are you suggesting that a man of my scrupulous integrity would trade his pen for a mess of potage?! Simply because in the course of my profession I happened to have struck up an acquaintance……” pg 17-18). Birdboot and Simon are similar in their flamboyant ways, and both of them were immediately captivated by Cynthia the moment she appears, to the point that when Birdboot takes over Simon’s place in the play in the second run, there is a parallel between Birdboot and Simon’s dialogue and thoughts.
Mrs Drudge: I have come to set up the card table, sir.
Birdboot (wildly): I can’t stay for a game of cards!
Mrs Drudge: Oh, Lady Muldoon will be disappointed.
Birdboot: You mean…you mean, she wants to meet me…?
Mrs Drudge: Oh yes, sir, I just told her and it put her in quite a tizzy.
Moon is the second- stringer in his journalistic world and is anxious to replace Higgs, to the extent of contemplating killing Higgs. He is eventually killed by his stand-in Puckeridge and dies with admiration for the murderer who got away with everything, including the object of desire, Cynthia.
Felicity Cunningham, the “trim-buttocked” young actress and Cynthia Lady Muldoon the object of desire (of the men within the play and also of the men within the play’s play) are other examples of the clichéd and formulaic characters in the play. Mrs Drudge, the charwoman of Muldoon Manor, is a highly comical character (who can clean an entire drawing room but fail to notice a corpse lying behind the settee), whose purpose in the play is to, firstly, provide all the details necessary for the audience to figure out the plot of the play and also to overhear each of the characters’ threat to kill Simon Gascoyne such that each of the characters have a motive to kill Simon ( Felicity: “I’ll kill you for this, Simon Gascoyne!”). For instance, Mrs Drudge answers the telephone and basically gives the setting and creates the element of suspense and mystery within the play:
Mrs Drudge: Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring….this is all very mysterious and I’m sure it’s leading up to something…
Major Magnus is the crippled half-brother of Lord Muldoon who appeared all of a sudden. Magnus turns out to be the Real Inspector Hound ( in the play’s play) and also Puckeridge (in Moon & Birdboot’s journalistic world) in addition to being Albert ( in the play’s play), Cynthia’s husband who was thought to be dead.
The dead body creates suspense from the very beginning. It was not a “character” initially, but towards the end when Birdboot discovers that the corpse is Higgs, it becomes a character, and reveals Puckeridge’s plot to kill the first and second stringer.
Bibliography
* Fleming, John. Stoppard’s Theatre: finding order amidst chaos. University of Texas Press, Austin, 2001.
* Martin, Richard and Rudiger Schreyer, Mirror Images (Klara Hurkova)
* Delaney, Paul, e. Tom Stoppard in Conversation, article: Stoppard Refutes Himself, Endlessly by Mel Gussow.
* Billington, Michael. Stoppard The Playwright. Methuen. London and New York. 1987.
* Gwee, Li Sui, lecture notes: Stoppard: The Text
* http://www.curtainup.com//stoppard.html
* http://www.stage-door.org/authors/stoppard.htm
* http://members.tripod.com/~warlight/aysegul2.html
* http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/001/712cycbw.asp
Done by: Lim Shu Fang (Sharon)
posted by Hound @ 6:57 AM
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