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written by Tom Stoppard, directed by Douglas Beattie

Touchmark Theatre, River Run Centre, Guelph

February 19-22, 2009

“... Gather So much as from occasion you may glean ...”

For Touchmark Theatre’s tenth season at the River Run Centre in Guelph, Artistic Director Douglas Beattie brings a wonderfully engaging production of Tom Stoppard’s now-classic 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  The level of quality of Touchmark productions has always rivalled the best of Stratford, the Shaw Festival or Soulpepper, but this year’s production generates that perfect sense of rapport among the main actors that shifts the whole work to an even higher plane.

Rosencrantz is one of several plays by Stoppard that show a preoccupation with how minor characters perceive a larger action in which they are primarily observers.  In The Real Inspector Hound (1968) Stoppard focusses on two theatre critics who watch a murder mystery on stage.  In Travesties (1974) he focusses on the memories of a minor British official who happened to be in Zurich in 1917 at the same time as James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara.  In Rosencrantz he takes two figures from Shakespeare’s Hamlet whose names have become a by-word for “insignificant characters” and made them the main characters of his play.  While all the major events of Hamlet occur offstage, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are left to wonder what they were sent for and what they are supposed to do.  Their situation is thus very much like that of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as the two look for some sign to give their existence meaning.  It is also much like that of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author except that unlike Pirandello’s characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to be unaware that they are not people but characters in a play and have no existence outside it.  In  Hound and Travesties, the perception of the minor characters actually changes the events they observe.  In Rosencrantz, the scenario is fixed and as the title tells us leads inevitably to their demise.  This situation allows Stoppard to have his two characters ponder not only the meaning of their existence but also questions of chance, free will and fate.

In Shane Carty and Damien Atkins, Beattie has found the ideal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, although by the end you will be as confused as to which is which as they are themselves.  Like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon they seem to be almost two halves of the same person.  Rosencrantz, like Estragon, seems to be the dimmer but more practically-minded, of the two, while Guildenstern, like Vladimir is preoccupied with philosophic speculation.  The opening discussion about coin-tossing not only introduced the question of chance versus fate but suggests that the duo themselves may be two sides of the same coin.  Under Beattie’s keen direction Carty shines in this comic role in a way he never had a chance to in his years at Stratford.  The combination of his sturdy body type and mellifluous voice with Rosencrantz’s general air of cluelessness is delightfully funny throughout.  Meanwhile, Atkins, too, gives one of his finest comic performances, giving us the notion that Guildenstern senses the futility of his speculations even as he indulges in them, this futility growing to a greater feeling of dread as the play continues.

Carty and Atkins are supported by an excellent cast led by Brian Tree as The Player.  Those familiar with Hamlet will recall that The Player is the one whom Hamlet requests to deliver the speech about Pyrrhus’s murder of Priam.  In Stoppard’s play, The Player is the character most in touch with the realities of life and most aware that he and they are merely characters in a play.  He’s the one who knows, “We're actors. We're the opposite of people.”  Tree commands the stage and gives The Player just the right edge of pomposity which drops to simple anger when the duo fail to understand him.  

Some productions of this play seem to think that since it is supposed to be a comedy even the scenes taken directly from Hamlet ought to be played as comic.  This means that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not only trapped in Shakespeare’s Hamlet but in a bad production of that play.  Fortunately, Beattie avoids this approach since it ultimately trivializes the tragic world that our duo try desperately to comprehend.  The Hamlet cast is also a fine one with Eric Woolfe as Hamlet filled with a pent-up anger whenever he meets his two former schoolmates since he knows they were “sent for”, that is, to spy on him.  Andrew Sabiston is a raging Claudius, Patric Masurkevitch a comic Polonius, Lara Rose Tansey a not-so-innocent Gertrude and Alison Deon an Ophelia near to an emotional breakdown.  David Mackett is The Player King and Michèle Kaye is Alfred, name Stoppard gives the boy actor who plays The Player Queen.  The dumbshow they rehearse to precede “The Murder of Gonzago” is one of the best stagings of the scene I’ve ever seen, with fluid, expressive stylized gestures.  The dumbshow is often played for comedy, but this is a mistake since it is, after all, a prelude to tragedy.               

Beattie’s set design is very simple.  We in the audience are conceived of as being at the back of the stage looking past the backs of wooden legs on either side of a proscenium opening into a darkened auditorium, an effect largely achieved through Eric Goudie’s effective lighting through a back scrim.  The transition from Act 2 to Act 3 could have been smoother.  Since the location of the action is actually on a stage, it could simply be an outright scenery change in working light behind the presumably closed front curtain with all hands pitching in rather than being half-hidden in dimness.  In this act the precision of Goudie’s lighting is essential in demonstrating Guildenstern’s awareness of the ephemerality of our existence: “Now you see it.  Now you don’t.” 

Once again the citizens of Guelph should feel proud to have a professional theatre company of such a high calibre right in their midst.  Beattie and his cast have got this play exactly right and the comic rapport between Carty and Atkins as the titular anti-heroes is priceless.  Theatre-lovers residing outside Guelph should make a point adding Touchmark’s productions to their theatre calendar or risk missing some of the most insightfully directed shows in Southern Ontario.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Damien Atkins and Shane Carty. ©Douglas Beattie.