On a barren stage, two characters of little literary significance flip coins and futilely debate the possibility of a coin landing on heads 92 consecutive times – which it has, according to the exasperated losing party.
“There is an art to the building up of suspense,” he said. Such release-free suspense forms the backbone to their comically tragic tale.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard’s absurdist 1966 play, is the Sock ’n’ Buskin Theatre Company’s latest production, and sees Stuart Matthews and Michael Showler take the lead as their respective characters.
The play is an existentialist and darkly comic side-story to what is arguably Shakespeare’s most famous work, Hamlet. Without risk of spoilers – the eponymous characters’ fates are sealed in the title, after all – Stoppard’s play depicts Hamlet’s ill-fated school friends being summoned for reasons they don’t know, told to gleam information they never actually manage to gleam, and sentenced to death for the mere misfortune of being unimportant players in a much grander story.
Sitting down after the first performance, director David Dawson and artistic director Keith Cressy are somewhat relaxed.
“It’s just opening night. No big deal,” Dawson said, seeing the premiere performance as a “warm-up show” to work out the kinks.
Before joining the production, Dawson was virtually prepared for the material, having directed a Sock ’n’ Buskin production of Hamlet a few years previous.
He said he was directed towards the play by Cressy, who also plays a conniving Hamlet to Matthews and Showler’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Cressy said putting on Stoppard’s play was a means of keeping Shakespeare alive.
“The better you know Hamlet, the better the show is,” Cressy said.
Dawson said although modern audiences aren’t as theatrically literate as they were in the ’60s, they aren’t likely to be left behind due to the play’s idiosyncratic nature, which he describes as “a ride without worrying too much where you’re going.”
Indeed, this is a recurring theme throughout the play, with its titular characters propelled from one vague scenario to another with little-to-no idea of where they’re headed or why they’re headed there.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a dialogue-driven piece containing repetition and confusing periodic switching of names, though according to Dawson these challenges were countered by the actors’ professionalism.
“[Showler] had the whole play loaded up in a week,” he said, adding Matthews didn’t join the production until three to four weeks previous.
Movement also played a key role in memorization, with the actors associating lines with gestures or stage directions. The end result is Stoppard’s characteristic back-and-forth repartee, a fast-paced verbal tennis match but with nary a line fumbled. But, staying true to the spirit of the play, nary a point scored, either.
There is also the unique situation of having three distinct styles of acting on stage at once: the measured dignity of Hamlet’s primary characters, the overwrought mannerisms and speech of the nameless player and his theatre troupe, and of course the comparatively casual banter of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is playing at the Kailash Mital Theatre Nov.19-28.