Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Stoppard, Tom (Vol. 91) - John Simon (review date 10 April 1995)

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John Simon (review date 10 April 1995)

SOURCE: "Wits' End," in New York Magazine, Vol. 28, No. 15, April 10, 1995, pp. 74-5.

[In the following excerpt, Simon argues that although Arcadia is clever, the play suffers from too much erudition.]

"Its ingenuity is stupendous," wrote Harold Hobson in the London Sunday Times about Tom Stoppard's first hit, and so is that of his latest, Arcadia: stupendous and sometimes, I'm afraid, stupefying. To say that Stoppard is the cleverest playwright active in English is probably a platitude. But cleverness engenders its own problems: It is almost as hard for a clever playwright to create an unclever character as it is for a plodding playwright to create a clever one.

But some characters, even in a Stoppard play, cannot be clever. The only way the author can manage this is to make them into fools or near-mutes. There is nothing in between, where most of the real world situates...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Vincent Canby (review date 31 March 1995)
   2. John Simon (review date 10 April 1995)
   3. John Lahr (review date 17 April 1995)
   4. Tim Appelo (review date 1 May 1995)
   5. Anne Barton (review date 8 June 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright