Word: rosencrantz
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...current production at the Boston Shakespeare Company (in rep with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) follows this creed wholeheartedly, quoting the above statistics in its program notes and approaching the play with an appetite for "deep meanings" that recalls the legend of the first-time viewer who exclaimed, "I don't know what everyone sees in this play--it's just a lot of cliched quotes strung together." A weighty interpretation is often provocative, even moving. But (the purist cries desperately), there must be a few subtleties of psychology or modernity that even Hamlet does not contain. And under...
...total darkness (and nightclothes) on the edge of the stage, a cigarette lighter in hand. "To be?" he asks, flicking on the lighter, "or," flicking it off, "not," flicking it on again, "to be?" Too much, even though the flame-play is brilliantly echoed at the end of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to illuminate a different line entirely...
EVERYTHING THAT FUMBLES and gets lost in Cain's laborious excavation of meanings from within is illuminated from without by the flip-side production. Tom Stoppard's wild and brilliant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, directed by Thomas Edward West...
...hour marathon. It is still a winning combination, carried out smoothly by the BSC. Most of the cast is identical for the two shows, with the disappointing exception of Hamlet himself, and selected routines evoke one show in the midst of another--notably, the first entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, in which the two, with more snap and individuality than such small parts would otherwise command, silently go through one of Stoppard's coin-flipping routines...
Likewise, the finest moment in Rosencrantz occurse when Hamlet, having rushed onstage (to R and G's usual befud-dlement), begins delivering a soliloquy to the theater's rear wall, and the parallel strikes home: When the Prince delivered that soliloquy in his own play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were upstage of him, seeing only his back. The audience has been placed entirely within the spies perspectives as minor characters within a larger show, summoned mysteriously from a place they cannot remember on a mission they cannot understand...