Stoppard's Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos by John Fleming, and: The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard ed. by Katherine E. Kelly (review)

[30 REVIEWS notion to all plays across every moment of the dramatist's career, Prentice allows a fidelity to her early assertions about love to sidetrack her analysis. For example, even in the above statement, she seems to overlook Pinter's sen· sitive portrayals of relationships between family members, for example, between Dusty and Jimmy in Party Time and the women and the prisoners they've come to visit in Mountain Language. Still, Prentice's work offers a thorough discussion of nearly every major work by Harold Pinter, and that alone qualifies her work as a genuine contribution to drama criticism. Her book and Gordon's casebook work well together, in that while one details primary texts, the other offers a helpful survey of the key critical statements made about these texts. Both will appeal to fans of Pinter's work and students of Pinter criticism. JOHN FLEM ING. Stoppard's Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 200 1. Pp. 344. $45.00 (Hb). KATHERINE E. KELLY, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 200 I. Pp. 25 1, illustrated. $54.95 (Hb); $'9.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Nortlt CarolinG State University Two valuable additions have been made to the field of Stoppard studies specifically and to modern drama generally: a useful and engaging guide to Stoppard 's theatre and a wide-ranging Camhridge Companion that thoroughly lives up to the strong reputation of the series. Despite overlaps such as similar Stoppard chronologies and bibliographies, the books are highly complementary. In Stoppard's Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos, John Fleming takes us chronologically through Stoppard's dramatic (£uvre, devoting a chapter to each major play and pausing to assess minor ones within that framework. Fleming's two major strengths are his firm grounding in theatre, which allows us to view the texts through the prism of performance, and his skillful use of archival material, since he is "the first scholar to examine in depth Stoppard's personal papers" (4-5) at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. (The final chapter of The Camhridge Companion, by Melissa Miller of the Ransom Humanities Research Center; provides a detailed summary and bibliography of these holdings.) One of the treasures resulting from Fleming's work with the Stoppard papers is a chapter on his little -known play Galileo, a thorough reworking of Brecht's Galileo. One of the rew to have actually read the play, Fleming provides detailed textual analysis that gives the impression of a highly original, serious drama that deserves to Reviews 131 be staged. The remarkable plans for the play's production in the London Planetarium included interesting stage effects such as having "eleven theologians [...] gently lifted into the air in a slow arc, like the arc the earth makes round the run Is ic], and at the same time, they gently rotate as the earth does on its journey" (Stoppard qtd. in Fleming 270, note 9). We can only hope for some brave director to bring these plans to fruition. Supported by his analysis of promptbooks, authorial correspondence, and other manuscrlpt material in the Texas archives and elsewhere, Fleming's careful examination of all the available drafts is well executed and will be his book's greatest appeal to scholars. The organizational principle used to determine which material should go in the notes is puzzling, however: as Fleming explains, "for scholars already well versed in Stoppard's work, new insights may be found in the notes, as the nuances culled from Stoppard's papers have often been placed there" (4). The result of this strategy is notes that are often heavily discursive and contain information that belongs in the body of thc text, such as a page-and-a-half discussion of Fleming's definitions of the terms "modernism" and "postmodernism" and Stoppard's relationship to them - a topic that quite rightly merits a whole chapter by Michael Vanden Heuvel in The Cambridge Companion. This seemingly arbitrary relegation of important material to the endnotes can be frustrating and cumbersome for the reader. At the same time, Fleming's play-by-play approach, plot summaries...