Hip Shot: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Redrum at Fort Fringe
Remaining performances:
Thursday, July 23, 10:00p.m.
Saturday, July 25, 7:00p.m.
They say: Are you lost? Confused? Lacking motivation? Ros & Guil have your answer: certain death and rhetoric! The characters from Hamlet are back as Tom Stoppard’s classic wit and wordplay explore the one thing that will eventually unite us all: death.
Brett’s take As it happens, I love this play; this is third version I’ve seen. I’ve very much wanted to take in a production that cut back on the high-budget excesses of the Centerstage (Baltimore) one I saw—especially since R&G Are Dead was the original Fringe gem. Thus I was fully prepared to adore this show; kindly bear that in mind.
This version is cut-down to one hour, the better to fit the modern DC Fringe’s expectations (the original runs 2 1/2 hours with two intermissions). If ever there was a script that seemed like it could bear a few nips and tucks, but really can’t, it was this one; in fact I almost believed it could. For those unfamiliar, the play concerns the nonadventures of the titular secondary characters from Hamlet, oft confused with one another (even by themselves), borne along by a fate they do not understand, destined to have their casual offstage death related in a single line near the end of Shakespeare’s master tragedy. The pair stay on stage the whole time, debating probability, rhetoric, fate, purpose, death, and the nature of waiting offstage for Hamlet to come do his one big scene with them.
Therein we have the first problem with this production. In a play about two men waiting, cutting two whole acts into forty minutes removes all the sense that they’ve actually been waiting very long. The magic of the play lies in watching the pair get tied up in philosophical knots, in seeing a couple of ‘little people’ like ourselves try and make some sense out of the empty gaps of time between fateful encounters; instead, this production comes off like Stoppard’s greatest hits (and not even all of them—no “We’re actors; we’re the opposite of people!”) sans the connective tissue of gloriously, methodically mounting tension. The pacing becomes more natural in the well-staged final act (on the boat to England), but even then, a most important death scene is rushed.
The other problem lies in the execution. What I had hoped for was a stripped-down approach to the play, in which the words were allowed to stand on their own. However, the performances too frequently undermine Stoppard’s text. This was the third performance of five; stepping on cues and forgetting lines can no longer be chalked up to early-run stumbles—particularly when the lines being quashed are some of Shakespeare’s most famous (Hamlet says “Except my life” three times, folks). The most egregious offender in this regard—and the most disappointing, because her tough-yet-weaselly characterization was otherwise so entertaining—was Prairie Griffith as the Player, who needed at least one reminder of her lines onstage. Likewise, Aubri O’Connor and Tiffany Garfinkle are temperamentally well-cast as the hapless title clowns (I’ll pause to mention that this is an all-women production; the gender-switching neither adds nor detracts), but too often do not grasp that in order to sell Stoppard’s (and Shakespeare’s) lines, they must play them as if they believe what they are saying, even when their characters are being incurably thickheaded. This was evidenced in many of Stoppard’s most reliable metaphysical twisters and laugh-lines (”Eternity’s a terrible thought, I mean where’s it going to end?”) falling flat. The pair was better at selling the emotional lives of the characters and capturing the competitive-but-codependent relationship between them.
Do not get me wrong; for frequent stretches of the play, O’Connor and Garfinkle held me with Stoppard’s wit. The problem was inconsistency. On the other hand, the young lady who claimed to “hate going to theater” sitting behind me loved it; so with that in mind I will venture the See-and-Skip-It-Ifs:
See it if: You’ve no familiarity with the play, and don’t think you could ever sit through more than 60 minutes of wordy theatre.
Skip it if: You want to know what all the fuss with this play is about; or, you do know what all the fuss is about.
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11:20 am
Just a factual correction the above review, the show was 90 minutes.
For a different opinion on the show, here is DC Theater Scene’s review.
http://dctheatrescene.com/2009/07/16/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead-2/
11:32 am
I’m very surprised that Stoppard would have allowed R&G ARE DEAD to be cut like this (and I’m really not implying that anyone did anything wrong, just curious)–was that a tricky permission to get?
11:38 am
Thanks – I don’t know how I got it into my head that I was just an hour, if I’d paused for a moment I’d have realized that was wrong. Nevertheless, a signficant cutting.
And thanks for the link to the other review – I think it’s always very instructive when two reviews are so polarized – much more helpful in making your decision on seeing the show than just having one alone.
5:02 pm
Factual correction to the review, Hamlet’s line “Except my life” is in fact repeated in Stoppard’s script 3 times, the repetition is not an error.
S squared – A significant portion of the cuts made to the script for this production were actually suggested by Stoppard himself. If you purchase a copy of the script from Samuel French, Inc. from whom the rights to the show may also be purchased, you will find large chunks of the text in brackets that Stoppard inserted when the script was printed. We made some additional cuts to keep from running over 90 minutes, but they were minimal. Stoppard’s own introduction to the script lays out his reasoning behind the cuts – that in his opinion the show turned out to be too long, and can be very effective even paired down.
6:02 pm
Yawn…another smug and self-aggrandizing yet underemployed theater hack who loves the sound of his own voice and the sight of his own prose, even when said voice & prose are both factually incorrect and fundamentally non-sensical. “If ever there was a script that seemed like it could bear a few nips and tucks, but really can’t, it was this one; in fact I almost believed it could.” What kind of textual and logical cortortionism is this?
While the Player did seem stumble-prone in one of the two performance I’ve seen of this show so far, the leads do a magnificent job of conveying the existential angst of the play’s title characters. The minimalism of the costumes, and costume changes for those actors playing multiple characters, might be confusing to anyone unfamiliar with the story of Hamlet, but overall I think the play works very well.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am friends with several of the cast members and their co-webmaster. I’ve also seen 8 Fringe shows so far this year (on my way to at least 20), and I can safely say that R&G is one of the better productions so far, and one of the more intellectually ambitious.
9:46 pm
I didn’t mean that the repitition of “Except my life” was in error; I meant that it was correct, or would have been if it hadn’t been “quashed.” In the production I saw, this line was stepped on twice – first as the first “Except my life” was being uttered, and then again before she could get to the second.
Brian Flores, I admit the verb tense in the quoted line is a little confused. Such are the perils of the Hip-Shot format, I suppose. The intended meaning: the play might be popularly judged as one that can bear cutting; I felt that way too; as it turns out, it can’t. -One could say this puts me at odds with Mr. Stoppard himself, given Nu Sass’s revelation – but I would say rather that this raises the question of whether the production was up to the challenge of realizing the shorter version of the play. It felt rushed to me.
I apologize if I give the impression of being smug or… underemployed?… but I did, in the end, like many things about this piece. (One line I cut for space: “Raven Bonniwell could make a fine and cunning Hamlet given Shakespeare’s full role.”) I meant to convey that I, as but one of *many* familiar with the play, felt let down in the end.
8:15 pm
In reference to a couple of points – so, as the actors are not ‘blamed’ (poor word choice, can think of no other at the moment) – - –
- – - Hamelet’s “except my life . . . except my life . . . ” was performed consistantly as rehearsed by both Raven Bonniwell and Steph Svec. It was a directorial choice not a mistake on their part.
- – - I believe there was some line jumping however, some is called for in the script, whether it was poorly executed or too believable may be a ‘matter of taste’.
Thanks for coming and for taking the time to review and respond to comments. Cheers!
11:45 am
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