Word: rosencrantzes
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Only the players seen through the blue gauze remind the audience of the play's links with Hamlet and with tragedy--when the down-at-the-heel band of players doubles as Denmark's familiar royal family. The troup's leader (Kevin Jennings) confronts the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a one-upmanship that never flags. As both the king and the head Player. Jennings plays with vigor and consistency the role of crafty manipulator, impressing upon the audience Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's powerlessness to control their fate...
...lidded box: "Life in a box is better than no life at all. . . You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking--well, at least I'm not dead! In a minute someone's going to bang on the lid and tell me to come out," Rosencrantz says...
...another level, being encased in a box symbolizes not only death's inescapability but also the characters' limitations within the constraints of the original Hamlet. Stoppard wanted to emphasize these limitations by confining Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their original roles as bit parts, servants of greater wills. He magnifies the characters without strengthening them--even in their own play they remain ineffectual word-wielders with no more identify than they had as Shakespeare's tools...
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...