After 50 years, Stoppard’s Hamlet spin-off is very much alive and kicking
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Still flushed with the irreverence, dash and daring of youth – or past-it and staggering onwards to meet its quietus? That brain-boxy Hamlet spin-off Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead (which lifts a speculative curtain on the “backstage” travails of the two hapless pals of the Dane as they get embroiled in the intrigues of Elsinore and finally pay the price) has hit the big 5-0.
Tom Stoppard – who made his name with this meta-theatrical tragicomedy in 1967 (and has done really rather well for himself ever since) – was there to cheer it on last night at the Old Vic, scene of its first London triumph.
With Daniel Radcliffe in the cast the audience was stuffed to the gunnels with well-known faces.
From the world of Harry Potter were Fiona Shaw and Toby Jones, while celebrity muggles included Twiggy and Sir Bob Geldof.
Everyone loves Sir Tom. So much so that they’d probably have laughed at this quirky-subversive theatrical footnote to Shakespeare’s masterpiece even if time had not been remotely kind to it.
But the big question for a critic – up there with “To be or not to be?” – must be: are we genuflecting out of duty, or genuine pleasure?
It’s a hand-on-heart relief to report that David Leveaux’s revival argues the case for it as compellingly and persuasively as I think its author could wish.
The central conceit combines intertextual liberty-taking with philosophical glances at its protagonists’ lack of free will (epitomised by its famous early sequence involving a tossed coin that repeatedly lands on “heads”).
All the world’s a stage and most of the men and women, Stoppard notes here, merely bit-part players. In the wrong hands, the combination of existential angst and in-jokiness could become tedious.
But Leveaux’s cast serve the combination of high-brow antics and music-hall larks, the nods to Beckett and the hints of Beyond the Fringe brilliantly.
It’s not a side-splitting evening but it tickles just as it should and there’s the added poignancy of realising that in Stoppard’s beginning lay shudders at the finality of death; “the endless time of never coming back”.
Marooned on a bare set adorned with unlovely cloud-daubed stage flats (with swishings of embroidered curtains), Radcliffe’s Rosencrantz and Joshua McGuire’s Guildenstern are a delight as the discombobulated double act, bewildered as to their mission, bickering like a married couple and jolted in and out of affected Shakespearean mode as the court sweeps this way and that.
A lightly bearded Radcliffe – with deathly pallor, startled eyes and school-boyish eagerness that will be familiar to fans – is the perfect foil to McGuire’s more ebullient sidekick, who is all pained grins and barely suppressed panic.
The pacing is fleet, the timing slick, and memorable moments are in sufficiently plentiful supply.
David Haig deserves a special mention as the Player, a scene-stealing combination of obsessive old stager, cockney wheeler-dealer, pimp and pirate, surrounded by a hangdog, Pierrot-faced entourage.
In the final analysis, though, the laurels belong to Stoppard. You did it then, sir. You’ve done it again.