ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. To 23 July.
Tour
ROSENCRANTZAND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD
by Tom Stoppard
English Touring Theatre Tour to 23 July 2005
Runs 2hr 35min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 May at Oxford Playhouse
Stephen Unwin's outstanding production is essential Stoppard viewing.Though it's rooted in a cut-and-paste job on England's best-known play, Stephen Unwin's admirably clear yet detailed production - adroitly matching comedy and pace with a thoughtful response to Tom Stoppard's first major script - reveals how much this philosophical comedy inherits from French existentialist drama. Which, of course, is anglicised with plentiful splashes of humour and theatricality.
Michael Vale's set places the Elizabethan costumed production in a modern rehearsal-room. Doors magically open for entrances one side and exits the other, vanishing into the walls when closed. Only a fire door's marked, becoming the duo's final exit, to freedom or death.
At first sight it might seem Unwin's joined the Claudius and Gertrude train of those who can't tell their Rosencrantz from their Guildenstern. Nicholas Rowe's tall, angular thinness seems natural for the sharper-edged Guildenstern, while James Wallace's comfortable roundness would seem to embody the cheerily vacuous Rosencrantz. Yet Rowe's face often blears over with muddle, while Wallace's eyes and frequently gesturing fingers eternally puzzle-out and seek solutions, making a superbly apt partnership built from the needs of contrasting people.
There's a whiff of Sartre's Huis Clos in their confinement together as others burst in and troop out for the Hamlet sections. Far stronger is the fraternity Rowe and Wallace make clear with Beckett's Godot tramps, the sharp and duller witted, one paraphrasing or adding list-like to the other's words, enjoying brief surges of language which create illusions of purpose and always, unable to part.
Then there's James Faulkner's remarkable leader of the Hamlet player-troupe, pitching in with robust-voiced, edge-of-bombast tragedy flicking to light-voiced delicacy in a performance making this a 3-way play, amplifying the post-tragic resonances.
If there's a weakness, it's that the performances imported from Hamlet lack the same precision and technical strength. If this is deliberate it's miscalculated. While throwing interest on to the central pair's limbo it fails to suggest there's anything more dynamic around them, that others have a purpose the friends can never search out.
But this remains a smallish point in a splendid revival that catches Stoppard's wit and wondering. It shouldn't be missed.
Rosencrantz: Nicholas Rowe
Guildenstern: James Wallace
The Player: James Faulkner
Players: Ed Browning, Grant Gillespie, Richard Hansell, Edmund Kingsley, Charlie Roe, Leon Tanner, Ross Walton
Director: Stephen Unwin
Designer: Michael Vale
Lighting: Ben Ormerod
Music: Olly Fox
Costume: Mark Bouman
Assistant director: Katie McAleese
Assistant designer: Charlie Cridlan
2005-05-31 13:35:50