Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Cherokee County Schools

Like Beckett's tramps, these two silly, rather likable Elizabethan courtiers are trying to get through life with a
little human dignity and perhaps here and there a splinter of comprehension. They play games with each other
and constantly question not their past (probably only heroes can afford that luxury) but their present and their
future. Especially their future.
On the road they meet the strolling players, also, of course, for the plot is a mousetrap seen from the other side
of the cheese, on the road to Elsinore. The leading Player, a charming, honest and sinister man, invites the two
to participate in a strolling play. They, with scruples, refuse, but in fact they cannot refuse—because in life this
precisely is what they have done.
Mr. Stoppard seems to see the action of his play unfolding like a juicy onion with strange layers of existence
protectively wrapped around one another. There are plays here within plays—and Mr. Stoppard never lets us
forget that his courtiers are not only characters in a life, but also characters in a play. They are modest—they
admit that they are only supporting players. But they do want to see something of the script everyone else is
working from.
It is one, of Mr. Stoppard's cleverest conceits of stage craft that the actors re-enacting the performance of
Hamlet that is, in effect, dovetailed into the main section of the play, use only Shakespeare's words. Thus
while they are waiting in the tattered, drafty ante-chamber of the palace for something to happen, we in the
audience know what is happening on the other side of the stage. As one of them says, "Every exit is an entry
somewhere else."
Finally reduced to the terminal shrifts of unbelief, it seems that Rosencrantz and Guildenstem realize that the
only way they can find their identity is in their "little deaths." Although on the final, fateful boat they discover
the letter committing them to summary execution in England, they go forward to death, glad, even relieved.
It is impossible to re-create the fascinating verbal tension of the play—Mr. Stoppard takes an Elizabethan
pleasure in the sound of his own actors—or the ideas, suggestive, tantalizing that erupt through its texture. Nor,
even most unfortunately, can I suggest the happy, zany humor or even the lovely figures of speech, such as
calling something "like two blind men looting a bazaar for their own portraits." All this is something you must
see and hear for yourself.
When the play had its first professional production in London in April of this year it was staged by the British
National Theater, and to an extent this version has been reproduced here by its original and brilliant director,
Derek Goldby. Helped by the tatterdemalion glories of Desmond Heeley's setting, the richness of his
costumes, and Richard Pilbrow's tactfully imaginative lighting, the play looks very similar. But whereas the
supporting players in London—the Hamlet, Claudius and the rest—could well have played their roles in
Shakespeare as well as in Stoppard, here there is understandably less strength.
However, the mime roles or the players (expertly devised by Claude Chagrin) are superbly done, Paul Hecht
is remarkably good as the chief Player (although I would have welcomed a touch more menace) and Brian
Murray and John Wood provide virtuoso portrayals as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Mr. Murray, blandly
exuding a supreme lack of confidence, and Mr. Wood, disturbed, perhaps more intellectually than viscerally,
play against each other like tennis singles champions. And luckily this is a game where neither needs to win
and both can share the trophy.
This is a most remarkable and thrilling play. In one bound Mr. Stoppard is asking to be considered as among
the finest English-speaking writers of our stage, for this is a work of fascinating distinction. Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern LIVE!
Review of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 18