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Book Reviews 235 drama of Tony Harrison. Of these, Romana Huk's discussion of Harrison's The Trackers ofOxyrhynchus has the exhilarating effect of making classical drama more immediately contemporary. more essentially "mod.em" in its cultural concerns than most drama written after 1960. ERROL DURBACH, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA PAUL DELANEY, ed. Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1994. Pp. 304. $44.50; $16.95 (PB). Tom Stoppard in Conversation makes readily available a variety of interviews with Tom Stoppard, drawn mainly from British and American sources. Delaney has carefully selected these conversations both to mark different productions and to provide insight into the playwright's life and writing process. His collection gives careful attention to Stoppard's writing for radio, television, and film as well as to the major stage works, and includes concise and readable introductions, a chronology, and an extensive bibliography and discography. Delaney's book should appeal both to fans of Stoppard and to theater historians. it revisits different points in Stoppard's career from John Dodd's 1967 conversation with the newly famous twenty-nine-year.old author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, to the 1993 Time interview on the premiere of Arcadia. For those seeking more intimate insights, Delaney includes profiles that reveal Stoppard as celebrity as well as Stoppard as playwright. For scholars. this book supplies critical context concerning the production and reception of each of Stoppard's major works. Particularly striking is the insistence of Stoppard on his theater's entertainment value, his love of comedy, and his debt to popular forms such as farce or detective mystery. In describing productions of his plays, as he does in detail in joint interviews with Peter Wood and lectures delivered at McMaster University, the playwright seems remarkably open to directorial Iiberties with his texts. Stoppard revels in stories of staging Travesties with a naked Cecily lecturing on Lenin, or of casting a woman as RosencranlZ. He talks about his own work with the skill and confidence of a practiced reviewer, taking advantage, perha ~s, of his background as a journalist. Although Stoppard has more than once said that he hates interviews, he is clearly in his element here. However diverse the topic, he remains consistently wilty and articulate, demonstrating his gift for quotable remarks. Delancy's collection marks several apparent transitions in Stoppard's work and altitudes . Early interviews in which Stoppard details his literary influences and writing processes create the most famous impression of the playwright defending his formal, intellectual, dispassionate theater against comparisons with "political" works of Osborne, Fugard, Brenton, and others. This impression is fueled not only by critics such as Kenneth Tynan (whose famous New Yorker profile is not included here) but also by Stoppard own most memorable comment that he is "deeply embarrassed by the statements and postures of 'committed' theatre" (50) and his insistence on the long. Book Reviews term value of plays: "In the end the best play about Vietnam will probably turn out to have been written by Sophocles" (196). Delaney's collection enables the reader to put such remarks in the context of both the interview situation and the larger debates about theater's social value that have occurred in the past three decades. Perhaps Stoppard's oft-quoted description of art as the "moral matrix, the moral sensibility from which we make OUf judgments about the world" from his 1974 interview "Ambushes for the Audience" allows for an easier transition to more overtly "political" interpretations of Stoppard as playwright. With Night and Day, the interviews take a new lone, lauding Stoppard for his newly commined stance as well as his involvement with writers such as Vaclav Havel. The image of Stoppard as the protector of style and intellectual writing in an era of shoddily written polemical plays gives way, luckily, to praise of works such as Professional Foul and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. The continued celebration of Stoppard's genius is apparent in later works, as interviewers carefully detail what might be called Stoppard's awakening awareness of the pressures of feminism and cultural difference. One reviewer marvels that Stoppard can write about love in The Real...

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