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PETER BROWN Return to previous page Peter Brown's Review Index
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
21 June 2011 This play is based on an idea which is, quite simply, inspired. Take 2 minor characters from one of Shakespeare's best-known plays - Hamlet - and turn them into major characters who reflect on their existence, struggling to understand their place in a scenario which they know nothing about. One would think that idea more than sufficient to create a staggeringly funny play. But Tom Stoppard's dialogue - especially in the exchanges between the two main characters - RosenCrantz and Guildenstern - is, for the most part, tedious. Apparently, director Trevor Nunn discovered the play among a pile of unproduced manuscripts early on in his career, but lack of funds meant he couldn't produce it as intended. Now, he has found the chance to tackle it in his season at the Haymarket and, for the most part, he's made a good job of it. Simon Higlett's design is bleak and morose being almost entirely black, apart from the arches which form the interior of the palace in Elsinore. So, it's left to Fotini Dimou's glorious costumes to inject some much-needed colour. Tim Mitchell's lighting also truly sparkles with a terrific starry sky right over the stage on the slatted ceiling. Steven Edis's music is delicately haunting, but seems inappropriate to capture the overall mood. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, in a very real sense, half-developed characters and intentionally so. They are seeking their own personas as much as trying to understand the plot with which they have somehow become entwined. They can't even remember their own names most of the time, and though that is funny at first, it becomes waring. The two characters are well-contrasted with Jamie Parker's Guildenstern the more philosophical of the pair, but rather mechanical in his actions. Samuel Barnett's Rosencrantz is more practical, more of a worrier, more hysterical and more camp. Chris Andrew Mellon is a wonderfully roguish Player, leading the troupe of impoverished travelling actors who have fallen on hard times to the extent that they will consider doing absolutely anything for money. Usually described as an absurdist, tragi-comedy, there's far too much of the cleverly-contrived absurd, and too little of the truly comic. The opening scene where we first meet the central characters involves endless coin tossing which rapidly becomes mind-numbingly tedious. Moreover, it sets the tone for the rest of the scenes between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which quickly instil dread. To be fair, things do look up in the second half when the pair find themselves embroiled in events in the Danish court, and there's little to carp about in the technical department or direction. But the huge promise embodied in the play's basic concept just never gets realised, leaving one with a deep sense of disappointment and a touch of bitterness. Peter Brown
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