Word: stoppard
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...Real Thing by Tom Stoppard. "I don't know how to write love," mourns Henry (Roger Rees), the playwright hero of Stoppard's new play. "Loving and being loved is so unliterary. It's happiness expressed in banality and lust." If Stoppard's other work (Jumpers, Travesties) can be seen as a series of dazzling games-word games, mind games, games the mind plays on itself, games of war and politics, the exasperatingly intricate game of life-The Real Thing announces itself as just that: a real, straightforward play about matters of the heart, one that...
...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...
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...
...slowing down the fast-paced delivery. Kaplan might have reinforced the contrast inherent in Stoppard's play and done more justice to the Hamlet half. For the near-antithesis between the two voices, the Shakespearean prose and the Beckett-like, riddling repetitions, lead to the play's core: Hamlet's tragedy as seen from side-stage, through the Godot-like absurdity of two characters who are not the least bit heroic...