Stoppard’s classic Shakespearean pastiche is a fascinating look at the essential mysteries of human existence. Delivered with both comedy and severity and theatrical in-jokes throughout, it’s the comedy of menace at its best.
What is our purpose? Are we free? Is meaningful communication possible? What does it mean to possess an ‘identity’? All these questions and more are brought to the fore in this intriguing existentialist comedy (a little oxymoronic, I know). Plot-wise, this play is, to say the least, perplexing, focusing on the lives of two side characters from Hamlet; and their attempts to work out whether he is mad or not. This plot runs concurrently to the original main plot of Hamlet, allowing for complex jokes on theatre and audience involvement (which is cleverly used throughout) and also numerous references to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the philosophers Sartre and Camus. These jokes then tie back into the original thematic content – one of the players from the original Hamlet appears throughout the play, once berating Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for not watching their own performance. They proceed to comment: what is it to perform without being watched? Picking up on both theatrical and philosophical concerns, then, is something that this play is about to the core.
The dialogue throughout is fast paced, witty, and intricate. In one particularly notable scene, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play a game of questions which makes them question their identity, their position and their place. The notion of whether Hamlet is in fact mad or not seems of cursory importance to the pair, as one asserts to the other he is sane, only to then re- ply later he doesn’t know. The characterisation of this lead pair is so subtly yet artfully done as to raise the question of whether they are not, in fact, flipsides of the same personality. Anger, witty sparring, humour, and a clear sense of brotherhood between the two: all give the appearance of a bizarre split personality.
The most profoundly moving moment, however, is Rosencrantz’s main speech. Commencing with what appears to be a serious reflection on death, this expectation of severity is then subverted by a joke that it is the idea of being boxed in rather than dying that scares him more. Yet then the speech mutates into an angry one on the futility of the human condition, revolting against his own mortality and sense of purposelessness. The acting made these philosophical ruminations seem all the more potent, making it transform from possibly pretentious posturings into deeply personal and universal fears about life and death. Ultimately, this play has yet another attraction to it, beyond the already impressive portrayal of a philosophically complex piece. Yes, dear reader, a certain member of the crew was heard saying in the smoking area at Cellar that this was “sort of the BNOC play for this term”. Who could resist checking out a play like that?
