Word: guildenstern
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead...
CONTRARY TO the titular claim, Rosencrantz (Linus Gelber) and Guildenstern (Andrew Watson), those two fatuous forgettables out of Hamlet, have been revived once again. Poor fellows, they're forced once more to wrestle with the existential riddles of Tom Stoppard's 20-year-old classic. Lucky for us, though, because the Leverett House production is a compellingly clever and lively show, a splendid send-off for the house theatricals season...
...Philip Barry. This is love among the leisure classes, in which aristocrats of style spend their time polishing epigrams and tiptoeing into one another's penthouse souls. Stoppard's characters have always been able to skate on their plays' surfaces with Olympic-gold dexterity; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers and Travesties long ago established him as the modern stage's star acrobat of language and ideas. But The Real Thing also has a heart-warm and throbbing with the domestic passion to which anyone, even an intellectual playwright, can happily succumb...
IMAGES OF ENTRAPMENT recur: Boxes appear on stage, both as tables and as a way for the players to appear and disappear. The effective use of curtaining to exclude Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from the rest of the players, and the thorough if unimaginative use of lighting to blacken the set completely, emphasize the duo's--and the audience's--helplessness. Like the players in Hamlet, we feel as if we are on the fringe of the real play that is slightly out of our sight. At times we are plunged into total darkness and feel the same apprehensions as Rosencrantz...
Another trap in Stoppard's play is the confining of rich, mock-Elizabethan dialogue to a spare, absurdist setting--as critics have pointed out, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern draws heavily from Samuel Beckett's style. But director Kaplan perhaps tips the scales too heavily toward the absurd tradition. The stark stage, the sparse furniture are all there, and rightly so. But the Shakespearean tradition is just as important: Stoppard includes sizable chunks from Hamlet, and his own words show a penchant for language tricks...