Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Written By Tom Stoppard...
CONTRARY TO the titular claim, Rosencrantz (Linus Gelber) and Guildenstern (Andrew Watson), those two fatuous forgettables out of Hamlet, have been revived once again. Poor fellows, they're forced once more to wrestle with the existential riddles of Tom Stoppard's 20-year-old classic. Lucky for us, though, because the Leverett House production is a compellingly clever and lively show, a splendid send-off for the house theatricals season...
...action has already begun as the audience files in: on a bare stage, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are flipping coins to pass the time. Stoppard has removed them from Hamlet and left them in limbo, without a script or even stage directions. They can't even keep their names straight. Adding to their general disorientation, the coins keep turning up heads, 92 times...
...jubilant finale, the troupe is now performing an uproarious double bill about bad theater and worse reviewers: Tom Stoppard's staging of his own The Real Inspector Hound, followed by Sheridan's dizzying spoof of epic tragedy, The Critic, last seen on Broadway 40 years ago in a production that featured Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson in roles that McKellen and Petherbridge play. Hound is a schoolboy-clever send-up of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, with all its clunking contrivances, coupled with the petulant fantasies of a second-string critic (Petherbridge) about an uprising by all the world...
Perhaps with a bit more practice, the actors will achieve the necessary unity to pull off a Stoppard play convincingly. It would certainly be a worthy aspiration...