Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Playwright: Tom Stoppard Director: David Leveaux
“Who says critics can’t make a difference,” asked Susannah Clapp in The Observer. Fifty years ago, this dazzlingly sharp and funny riff on Hamlet, the theatre and mortality – written by a then-unknown young playwright – sensationally transferred to the National Theatre’s then home, The Old Vic, after a student production at the Edinburgh Festival was spotted by The Observer’s reviewer, and hailed as a meeting of Beckett and Beyond the Fringe. Now, its author is a knight of the realm, and his play is back at the same London theatre, said Jane Edwardes in The Sunday Times, in an “inventive, outstanding production” by David Leveaux. Some productions of Tom Stoppard’s play tend to “meander and revel too much in the intellectual high jinks”. This one, by contrast, has a “welcome sense of drive” and energy.
Stoppard’s tragicomedy is (as one character describes it) “the usual stuff, only inside out”, said Ian Shuttleworth in the FT. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Hamlet – charged with trying to gain the prince’s confidence and spy on him. In Rosencrantz, Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude and the rest appear only occasionally to recite a few of Shakespeare’s lines before “our hapless pair return to their forlorn attempts to get a handle on goings-on either specifically at Elsinore or in general”. In the title roles, Daniel Radcliffe and Joshua Mcguire “bounce off each other like Spacehoppers on a day out”, said Ann Treneman in The Times: Mcguire the comedian, is “hyper”; Radcliffe the straight man, “beset with permanent anxiety”. Meanwhile, David Haig “steals the show” more than once as The Player, louche, swashbuckling and “hilariously self-important”.
Five decades on, a fair amount of the play’s self-referential humour no longer feels “electrifyingly bold, probably because it’s so often been imitated”, said Henry Hitchings in the London Evening Standard. Still, Stoppard’s “intellectual ping-pong” remains witty, vital and charming; “always clever and sometimes soulful”.
Monteverdi Choir: Bach, St Matthew Passion SDG £19.75 (2 discs)