Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...REPETITION of "heads or tails" in the opening scene of Tom Stoppard's Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead seems ironic, because the play is now worn like an old coin from passing through the hands of so many directors. Although it's been 16 years since its original minting, this weekend's Dunster House performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hasn't lost its edge. The innovation of two Shakespearean anti-heroes on center stage, the stark contrast between Elizabethan and modern language--and the themes of the finality of death, the role of fate and the insignificance of human life...
...stage is spare--swathed in a smoothing blue gauze--forcing the actors' charisma to sustain the show. Rosencrantz (Jim Torres) and Guildenstern (Steve Kelner) meet this demand; with exaggerated facial expressions and wild gestures, their compressed energy matches Stoppard's verbal swashbuckling, his inevitable bons mots...
...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...
Birdboot and Moon, as Stoppard has named the critics, have obsessions that dominate their thinking throughout the night. Moon is a second-string critic crazy with hatred for the first-string. "Perhaps he's dead at last, or trapped in a lift somewhere or succumbed to amnesia, wandering the land with his turn-ups stuffed with ticket stubs," he muses. Birdboot is interested only in ogling young starlets and keeping smut out of the theatre. Fulfilling what must be every playwright's ultimate fantasy, Stoppard uses the self-centered antics of these two to mock the whole business of theatre...
...curtain raiser (The Real Inspector Hound is quite short), the troupe performs Stoppard's equally delightful Dogg's Hamlet. This manic digest of all the famous lines from Hamlet sets the tone well for a lively, if light-weight evening. What with the Hamlet sword play and Inspector Hound's bang-em-up ending, we get a whole lot of corpses for our money...