The Haymarket, 11th July 2011
First, a confession - or perhaps just common knowledge: I love Tom Stoppard. Not romantically, that would be weird, but he is, without doubt, my favourite playwright of the 20th century, perhaps my favourite of all time after that little so-and-so from Stratford who manages to sneak in and steal the top spot. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead comes second only to Arcadia in my list of Stoppard favourites and, in many ways, seems to be a play tailor made for me: it's full of erudite, self-satisfied, undergraduate humour, contains long philosophical tennis matches on death, free will, determinism and storytelling, and, best of all, it does clever things with my actual favourite play of all time, Hamlet. (I'm aware, by the away, that all these are highly unoriginal favourites but, what are you going to do? Cliches are just truths people are tired of hearing.) Add in the fact that this is the first time I'd actually seen the play onstage and the whole production seemed to have been created entirely for my viewing pleasure (Directed by Trevor Nunn? Great. Tim Curry as the Player? Outstanding - even if he then dropped out due to a chest infection. Two History Boys as Ros and Guil? Yes. Please.) and I was almost bound to be disappointed - or at least incapable of reviewing it fairly and objectively. So please, if I get little excited at times, bear with me.
The play even opened with one of my favourite theatrical devices: precision lighting. In a lovely piece of foreshadowing, the disembodied heads of Rosencrantz (Samuel Barnett) and Guildenstern (Jamie Parker) seemed to hang suspended for a moment before the lighting spread slowly over their bodies and then the stage in general, revealing a very Beckettian tree in front of which the two hapless travellers are seated. Cue a sophisticated ripple of laughter from the audience. After all, how often do you get to laugh at a reference to a reference? Thankfully, however, Nunn's production handles the self-referential side of things with welcome restraint and the production is gloriously funny as a result, gently inviting us to laugh at the philosophical knots the characters tie themselves in, as well as with them. A word about the set here, actually, which is constructed of lines that vanish towards infinity and archways that seem to lead nowhere, perfectly evoking the idea that somewhere Hamlet is happening, only we can't quite find it but are stuck in its landscape anyway. The staging, too, is similarly simple yet inventive, making great use of two large leather satchels that Ros and Guil constantly sit on, use as pillows, pick up, sling round their chests, pull cloaks out of and put them back in, always travelling, never arriving. There was a nice touch also that took me a while to notice: Barnett and Parker's Renaissance courtier costumes turn out to be, on closer inspection, contemporary boots, jeans and jackets, leading to a lovely moment when they are faced with actor-versions of themselves, dressed this time in period costume that is familiar enough to give them pause, strange enough to make them uneasy.
Another confession, this one a real one: despite having been directed by Sir Tom himself and starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in the respective title roles, I don't really like the film. I find Oldman's Rosencrantz too obfuscatingly stupid and Roth's Guildenstern too prickly and defensive to be enjoyable and their chemistry sadly lacking. So it was a joy to see a kind of role-reversal enacted here: Barnett's Rosencrantz was childish and petulant but also highly strung and panicky, whilst Parker's Guildenstern had an air of stoicism, almost lugubriousness, that covered an altogether different kind of anxiety, a constant and wearying uneasiness about who they were and what they were doing and why he seemed to be responsible for it all. If forced to choose at gunpoint, I'd say that Barnett's Rosencrantz is more successful than Parker's Guildenstern by a hair, and I lay this more at the feet of the direction than the acting: a few too many of Guildenstern's lines that could be shocking or poignant or thoughtful are played for laughs.
In the event, this was my only disappointment about the production as a whole: in his note in the programme, Nunn calls the play " a masterpiece". It is a masterpiece, but Nunn doesn't direct it like one, or if he does, it is a comic masterpiece. The real, devastating impact of some of the contemplations of mortality are subsumed under the humour of the inept philosophers delivering them: Guildenstern's struggle to articulate the sheer negativity of death ("Death is nothing...death is not...it is the endless time of not coming back") seem oddly glossed over and the climactic moment in which he believes he has killed the Player was not climactic or shocking, with a fairly unconvincing death from the Player and little to no reaction from Guildenstern. Guildenstern accuses the players of cheapening death through performing it over and over again, arguing that it does not bring the experience of death home to anybody; it seems to me that the young Stoppard - as obsessed with mortality as anyone in their 20s - was trying to accomplish exactly this with the way Rosencrantz and Guildenstern simply vanish at the play's end. It is strange then, to see the actors march offstage, all the mechanics of theatre on show; one might have expected some of the fantastic pieces of lighting trickery exhibited elsewhere. Of course, much of this is just personal preference but I can't help but think the production would have been aided by a little more faith in the play's ability to do exactly what the travelling players fail to - "catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says - 'One day you are going to die.'"
But this does not significantly detract from all the wonderful things Nunn does do with play, and I was pleasantly surprised at some aspects of it that I had forgotten or just never occurred to me in the reading of it. The play's relationship with Hamlet, for once thing, with Nunn staging the extracts from Shakespeare almost as parodies, exaggerated versions of images we all know with the actors' lines echoing and reverberating through the corridors of Elsinore. I had also never appreciated Stoppard's sheer audacity: the moment in which Rosencrantz threatens to interrupt the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy in order to clap Hamlet on the shoulder and ask him "man to man" what's wrong is gleefully wicked, as is the Player's claim that he "extracts significance from melodrama, a significance that it does not in fact possess", in the middle of a rehearsal for a play that bears a suspicious resemblance to The Greatest Play In the English Language.
On the page, the constant sparring between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can be quick and dry, on the stage, Nunn, Barnett and Parker bring it gloriously - and believably - to life. Individually, Barnett and Parker put in fine performances but together they are wonderful to watch. The best moments of the play occur when the two are alone onstage together, simply reacting to each other's absurdities. The relationship is fierce, tiring, desperate, immensely affectionate and by far the best aspect of the show; after a tiff, Guildenstern comments, "The only beginning is birth and the only end is death - if you can't count on that, what can you count on?" and the two spontaneously (well, 'spontaneously') embrace, eliciting an actual "aaw" from the same audience that had tittered so politely at the Beckett joke. An odd mix of brothers and lovers, Nunn's greatest achievement is in locating the emotional heart of the play in a relationship so co-dependent they can't even keep track of which is which. The charge often levelled at Stoppard is that his plays are too intellectual, that they are plays about ideas, not people - in some way soulless. I never found this to be the case and it seems neither does he: in a very interesting interview between Nunn and Stoppard, printed in the programme, Stoppard states that the Ideas-with-a-capital-I follow the story, not the other way around - that for all the treatises on death and determinism, he was really only writing the story of two courtiers in Elsinore out of their depth. This production embraces the idea that we are simply following the narrative of two men who have no idea what to do and its most moving moments are where it acknowledges the state we are all in: clinging together for comfort against the coming dark.
It is not a perfect production and, as I said, more could have been made of the play's serious moments but it is dazzlingly funny and sweet, and Parker and Barnett make a wonderful double act. A well-deserved four stars then, and I look forwards to my next Ros and Guil with some apprehension. Above all, it achieved the thing that is the mark of great art: it made me want to go and make my own. Here's hoping that next time Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is revived in the West End, I have a hand in it somewhere.
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Apologies for the unintentional hiatus - the blog is officially back now! Expect posts about New York and lots of lists coming soon.
