See the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's production of the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, the play is famous for its survey of important 20th century-isms and black humor, and is often compared to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is performed rarely as it is, this year marking the 40th since its first production.
But don't let the rarity of its performances be your only impetus to rush out and see it in the BSF's incarnation -- it stands on its own laurels as securely as any unconventional play can stand.
What makes this production worthwhile is that it does more than evoke the pathos and tragedy of two men adrift in an unknowable, malignant world. Rather we, the audience, find ourselves pulled into their oblivion as well. The walls of St. Mary's Church (where the play was performed) fall away; the audience is made to ponder the selfsame questions of choice, meaning and truth as our protagonists. The final scene leaves one drained. You can hardly call the feeling catharsis; it is closer to infinity or emptiness.
One goes to watch the play, certainly. One knows that the title characters must be dead by the end of the play and so he can laugh at quips about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern "hanging around" or "losing their heads". But after a certain point the humor is less and less contextual, more universal, and the laughter fades.
Were the BSF a lesser group of performers, they might try, by various devices, to keep things roiling up until the final moments -- a task both impossible and ridiculous. Doing so would subvert the play's subtlety. Instead of this, the audience is left to grow increasingly self-aware as things become bleaker.
Dana Whipkey and Joe Brady, who play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, capture their characters perfectly, whether it's being funny, confused or distressed. The same goes for Tony Tsendeas, who plays the traveling actor as
the protagonists' counterpoint. The stop-and-go dialogue, mixed up with long monologues and silences and games and whatnot, demands much of an actor, but not one character seemed to have difficulty shifting from fast-paced verbal tennis matches to flowery Shakespearean Hamlet.
Although this is absurdist theater, the absurdism shouldn't be so overwhelming that we can't follow what's going on. The BSF keeps this from happening with a combination of clever staging, posing and music. The music was performed on stage in the background by actors, the woodwinds appropriately a quartertone out of tune with each other, perhaps to represent our main characters. The ensemble of players sing songs as well.
The set, a replica Elizabethan stage with two levels and six entrances besides the trapdoors, transforms from a road to a palace to a boat. All this is shown with a minimum of props and decoration. On the boat, for instance, the cast switches to coordinated swaying and slipping about to give the impression of a leaky rocking ship pushing through the North Sea.
One of the more intense scenes comes in the final act, when Guidenstern, driven by outrage and desperation, kills the Player King with his own knife. The audience, who believes that the character is now dead, watches him writhe in stage blood as his part of the play ends. After a beat or so of stillness, the other players burst into applause and the Player King stands and bows, then retrieves his stage knife from the bewildered Guidenstern. By this point the audience is somewhat used to the play-within-a-play device, used to the nth degree by Stoppard, although for the audience to see its own on stage self (Guidenstern here) taken in as well, within his own reality, marks a particularly powerful deception that smarts in the viewer and sets him doubting even the last scene.
St. Mary's Church in Hampden was a particularly intriguing venue for a play which dwells sardonically on that which many religions hold as God's domain: the notion of fate and chance. In fact, the play has little of morality or lessons to glean, nor does it present itself as such. That such an amoral play be shown in a church is a sort of irony; but the acoustics of the place are fabulous, so there is little wonder why it was picked. In any case, some of the audience perhaps will be led to further pondering over the question of God in R&G, and more power to he who does so. Thinking and questioning is one of theater's purposes.
In essence, R&G is a play with something for everyone and should be seen by everyone. Kudos to the BSF for making this possible and furthermore for doing it well.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead will be showing until April 23. Call (410) 366-8596 or visit www.baltimoreshakespeare.org for more information.
