Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd in ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead’, Photo by Stoo Metz Photography
Having just recently read Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play, I found it Clever (with a capital C), revelling in semantic gymnastics, but lacking much emotive depth. With Samuel Beckett’s haunting Waiting for Godot peering over its shoulder, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead reads to me like a meta-theatrical, parlour trick version of it; echoing the tragicomic absurdity and existential angst, but letting us all off the hook at the end, assured that it’s all just a play—on loop.
Neptune Theatre’s lush and atmospheric production, presented by Mirvish, is—to my delight—solid proof that a performance can unlock emotional resonance that even avid play-readers can fail to access from text alone. The hook here is the reunion of Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd (hobbits Merry and Pippin from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy), an endearing and charismatic duo who bring a feisty and guileless intensity to the play’s shrewd buffoonery.
The conceit of the play is that our titular pair—two minor characters, former school chums of the tormented Danish prince, who meet a bad end after drifting in and out of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—have their own story. Hamlet and company are glimpsed only in passing as they tangentially intersect the confused shenanigans of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
With their future uncertain and their past lost in a mental fog, they haphazardly speculate and philosophize about their present situation. As befuddled as they are, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stumble upon insights as their circular reasoning and linguistic sparring takes them on a meandering journey from statistical probability to the nature of death. The abstract phenomenon of fate creeps into their rambling conversations and eventually becomes a portentous burden.
“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.” The Player (Michael Blake), leader of a troupe of travelling thespians that call themselves Tragedians, provides theatrical context for all the seemingly senseless antics. Blake is my favourite performer here. With his commanding voice and alluring gestures, he’s a fanciful and stirring embodiment of dramatic spectacle. His speech about the obscenity of performing to an empty house, so gratuitous and indulgent on the page, is bursting with pathos here.
These scrappy Tragedians are a charming portrait of desperate and impassioned dedication to craft. Movement director Angela Gasparetto gives them a highly stylized gestural language, triggered by cues from their intrepid leader. The ensemble gives us distinct individuals falling all over each other as circumstances of their trade force them to be in constant motion, but they come together in perfect alignment as the needs of any dramatic moment demand.
Radiating out from them, the whole gestalt of director Jeremy Webb’s richly textured production is evocative of a theatre—the place and its people—that has seen better days. Shabby curtains hang with dejected majesty from rigging held precariously askew. The dilapidated space (set designed by Andrew Cull) is mirrored in Kaelen MacDonald’s whimsically threadbare costumes. Once vibrant colours persist with a dusty, weathered charm.
The third act’s boat-ride to England is quite a lovely effect. The modular, planked risers that provide levels for the action, come together to form the tiered deck of a ship. Hanging lanterns, Leigh Ann Vardy’s moody lighting and the gentle rocking motion achieved through continuous pushing and pulling—all come together in an enchanting sequence.
With its masterful balancing of the poignant, eerie and hilarious—I found this production thoroughly compelling, though I can’t help but continue to compare it to Waiting For Godot. Where that work remains quietly anguished, a potent tribute to the yearning for purpose and meaning after the awful devastation of war; Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, despite its lyrical musings about the finality of death, disarms the whole notion with a playful nudge and wink.
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
running March 5 to April 6, 2024
CAA Theatre (651 Yonge St.)
running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes (with 2 intermissions)
Michael Blake and company in ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead’, Photo by Stoo Metz Photography