Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Leeds)

Theses have been written and brains battered into painful submission in
the attempt to distil meaning from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Try it by all means.

Alternatively, you can accept the play in performance on a very simple
level as a play which literally plays – and that right joyously with the
very nature of theatre and performance. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
‘called’ to play their very limited roles in the story of Hamlet and find
themselves spending most of their evening backstage together, with neither
clarity of their history nor control of their destiny, and with only sporadic
grasp of their identity. They attempt, in the main hilariously, to make
sense of their predicament.

It is useful to remember that the play dates from 1967, when British theatre was still strongly influenced by absurdism. The parallels between our two protagonists and Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir (themselves based on Laurel and Hardy) are clear enough to see; and it is not fanciful to detect the redolence in the East European Stoppard’s play of those by Ionesco.

The French fashion for existentialism had still not played itself out either, so we get shades of Huis Clos mixed with the sparse intellectual landscape of a Resnais/Robbe-Grillet film. Then there was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, an earlier play but much revived in the 1960s… Thus the resonances build one on top of another, and all refer back
to the aesthetic climate of a particular era – and parody it with all the
theatrical brio and verbal pyrotechnics which we subsequently came to
recognise as the trademark of Tom Stoppard.

Gemma Bodinetz‘s magnificent production for West Yorkshire Playhouse
renders such contextual musings largely unnecessary, however. Set by Angela
Davies in a towering grey warehouse, with multiple clanking doors along the
length of its two obliquely positioned walls and opened only from outside, it
boasts a Guildenstern (Nick Bagnall), wiry and bursting with physical
energy like a sprinter from the blocks (whilst sounding not unlike Johnny
Vegas), with a Rosencrantz (Tom Smith) whose mien of Deputy Dawg crossed
with a Gorbals Stan Laurel provides a foil so perfect that it is hard to
regard them as other than definitive.

Add to them a Player King (Richard Bremmer) who conducts
himself with the authority of one for whom the transition between appearance
and reality is a nightly chore, and you have the core of
a performance which is never for a moment less than superbly entertaining.

– Ian Watson