Word: hamlets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THEATRICALLY AND intellectually, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the last decade's most awesome dramatic conceptions. An ingenious retelling of Hamlet from the point of view of that tragedy's two incidental victims, this piece of absurd theater involves difficult staging, acute psychological insight, and beautiful language which demands highly subtle direction and acting...
...Strong, are too sweet to be scheming and too sincere to be ridiculous. Tony Cesare's Polonius is silly, rather than senile; his character lacks what the genuine figure of Polonius invariably exhibits, an exaggerated sense of his worth and of the importance of his actions. Fletcher Word plays Hamlet who seems neither intense nor melancholy. Liz Hollister, however, portrays Ophelia effectively both in her Shakespearean and comi-tragic contexts; she performs her lines, taken directly from Hamlet, with suitable emotion, but dumbly submits to her being used as a prop in the play staged by Claudius and Polonius...
...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...
...various Houses will provide a wide scope of choices for theatre-goers. Describing the Ex's first weekend as "an amusing 'Waiting for Godot'," director Arthur Lasky '72 goes on to clarify his production of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead." Written by Tom Stoppard, it is a version of "Hamlet" seen from the perspective of two characters on the periphery of the action, "which gives the whole thing a sense of existential displacement." The following weekend, Arthur Fainsod '73 will be directing Ionesco's "Victims of Duty" in which the master of the ridiculous gets his kicks in depth psychology...
...with a portrait of Chairman Mao. An advertising executive displays a photograph of himself seated on a soapbox, while another patron adorns his checks with a bottle of his favorite whisky. The manager of a San Rafael branch of the bank uses enigmatic checks that show a gorilla gazing Hamlet-like at a skull. "I'm not sure what it means," he admits...