Word: stoppard
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EVERYTHING THAT FUMBLES and gets lost in Cain's laborious excavation of meanings from within is illuminated from without by the flip-side production. Tom Stoppard's wild and brilliant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, directed by Thomas Edward West...
...Stoppard's play "two of the most marginal characters in Shakespeare"--the pair of characterless spy-schoolfellows who conspire with Claudius against the Prince--occupy center stage, talking arguing and waiting while the action of Hamlet swirls incomprehensibly around them...
...with the disappointing exception of Hamlet himself, and selected routines evoke one show in the midst of another--notably, the first entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, in which the two, with more snap and individuality than such small parts would otherwise command, silently go through one of Stoppard's coin-flipping routines...
...rest of the play falls into place. And in the picture which it creates, Hamlet too takes on a clarity and reality than it could not realize if confined to Cain's relentless search for meanings in the unfathomably rich script. The "straight" interpretation of the Shakespeare that frames Stoppard's whimsy clashes oddly at times with the fanciful variations of Cain's direction, but no matter. This is what imaginative repertory ought to be--two plays that share everything and yet nothing, each distorting, reflecting, and illuminating the other...
...Seasons. For the first time, Spelvin is more than baffled. He feels a chill of apprehension, and rightly so, as he hears the stage directions: "The Executioner will be played by himself." When the curtain rises on curtain calls, Spelvin does not. This mordant conclusion echoes that of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Man is a simple soul inadvertently entangled in a blind mess called life with nary a clue as to its meaning and no aid from a Seeing...