Word: guildensterne
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This dramatic aspect of riddle solving seems to have a special appeal for British Playwright Tom Stoppard. Much of his first play, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern Are Dead, had those two pitiably bewildered title characters trying to figure out what the devil was going on in the castle at Elsinore. His new playlets are dramatic trifles compared to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the longer and better one, The Real Inspector Hound, is highly diverting. (The brief curtain raiser, After Magritte, simply reduces the deductive process to a bundle of false clues that turn the characters, as well as the lines, into...
...approval of audiences, enjoy advantages that people in an indeterminate world do not share. While love and providence provide meaning for the characters of Shakespeare, Stoppard's people have no external frame of reference. Unable to see that they themselves create the significance of their actions, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are caught in a world where their identities and their living and dying are equally arbitrary...
Joseph's troupe is also superb, always mirroring the unreality with which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern view the "real" world. Lauren Sunstein, as the sniffling and oft-abused Alfred, plays her small part exceptionally well, as do the other Players, whose near-wordless roles require remarkable agility and continually forceful expression...
...other shortcoming of the production is its editing of the text. Stoppard's text ends on Horatio's speech from Hamlet, in which his remarks on "casual slaughters" echo exactly Rosencrantz's desperate confusion. The Loeb production ends with the speeches of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which do not succeed as well in tying the work together and in reemphasizing the strange kinship of Shakespeare's and Stoppard's worlds...
...point, the Head Player explains to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. "We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style." The Loeb Ex production has both energy and great style, creating a world of small, struggling men caught, as Stoppard shows us, facing the obscurity of their own lives...