Word: rosencrantzes
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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...
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 MINOR characters were not as satisfactory, mostly because their roles were not so thoroughly conceived. Eloise Watt, as Gertrude, adds a nice touch with her lustful perusals of Rosencrantz. However, she and her Claudius, played by Bill 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...
...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...