Monday 1 May 2017

Playing With Words

Last week, for the first time in quite a while, I returned to my local Cineplex to see a live-audience telecast of a most unusual play.  Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead set the theatrical world abuzz at its premiere in the 1960s, and the current production at the Old Vic in London, commemorating the play's 50th anniversary, shows that it has lost none of its unique power or character during that time.

The staying power of this piece seems, at first blush, hard to comprehend.  After all, R & G manages to ignore many of the conventions of what makes "good theatre": plot (we all know ahead of time what's going to happen in the end), character development (the two leads are so interchangeable that even they aren't quite sure which is which), and dramatic arc (much of the play occurs in a state of stasis).  But of course, nothing is ever quite that simple and anyone who's ever tried to stage this play has found out in a hurry that the essentials are still all there -- just not obvious on the surface.

For those not familiar, R & G uses a unique device of focusing on the lives of two attendant figures in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet, following them rather than the main characters of the Hamlet story. Stoppard inserts bits of Shakespeare's play, including fragments of scenes involving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, at appropriate moments.  But as soon as we follow R & G "offstage" from Hamlet, so to speak, we find them living out a very different destiny of their own. The ruling puzzle of their lives is that they have no idea at all of what's going on behind their backs in what we know as Shakespeare's great tragedy.

Various people have tried to compare this play to others of the last century, most notably Waiting for Godot, but for me that doesn't work.  Any time I try to see a comparison, the differences end up overwhelming the similarities.

What's unique about Stoppard's writing in this script is the sheer verbal energy.  There are scenes where R & G play a kind of verbal tennis game.  There are speeches where the words don't seem to mean anything, tumbling all over each other every which way, until you hear them and realize that the speech is actually about images evoked by the sounds rather than by the meanings of the words.  And there are speeches which spin out in long, complex sentences to contrast with others where single words are batted rapidly back and forth.

That energy is also the keynote of the performance given by Joshua McGuire as Guildenstern and Daniel Radcliffe as Rosencrantz.  I've seen the play staged twice before, but never with such a strong mixture of speed and clarity in the delivery. This extreme energy has both good and ill results.  While it constantly sustains audience interest and involvement in the play, it tends to undercut the sheer unreality and absurdity of the piece.  It also diminishes the chilling effect of the final scenes in which R & G come face to face with their destiny, which is to die without ever having really understood what happened to them, why they have to die, or -- for that matter -- why they even lived.  All I was left with at the conclusion was a feeling of, "Oh, what a pity."  And that is a pity because the play can and should hit you a good deal harder when it goes dark in the concluding moments. Having said that, the variety of Radcliffe's and McGuire's performances was otherwise a delight.

More so than in the other productions I've seen, this one was totally dominated by the Player (played by David Haig -- imagine that, a player playing a Player!).  I've never really gotten a clear picture before of why the Player has been called a puppet master but it came across loud and clear in this production.  Haig's Player was dissolute, seedy, persuasive, insinuative, sexually suggestive, and totally compelling at all times -- both to R & G and to us.  His speaking style was set in total contrast to the speeches of R & G, with words drawled out slowly and stagily, so that every moment of the man's life became an act.  A masterly performance indeed.

The Hamlet sequences were simply staged, in a rather conventional style.  (Some productions manage to satirize Hamlet by exaggerating acting, costuming, etc., in these scenes).  Luke Mullins as Hamlet succeeded in these brief scenes in capturing something of the prince's ability to appear differently to different people.

Staging overall worked well, with tall, sweeping scrim curtains drawn across different parts of the stage at different times to conceal or reveal various acting areas.

This 50th anniversary production was strongly directed by David Leveaux.  He brought a great sense of the fun in the piece to bear on scenes that can easily become maddeningly repetitive when presented with less imagination.

Like the Shakespearean play from which it derives, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead has proven to be a durable classic of the theatre, not least because the script allows for such a variety of approaches to the material.  I don't suppose one could ever stage a definitive Hamlet or a definitive R & G are Dead -- and this certainly wasn't it.  But it was an effective and involving take on the play and the audience certainly enjoyed it.

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