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by Tom Stoppard, directed by Joseph Ziegler

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

February 13-March 6, 2013

Guildenstern: “We don’t know how to act.”

Soulpepper’s new production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is disappointing.  Tom Stoppard’s now classic play from 1966 looks at Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the point of view of its two least important characters.  The problem is that Ted Dykstra and Jordan Pettle who play the title characters are the least effective actors in the play.  On the other hand, the others are so good that you wish you were watching them playing Hamlet rather than Stoppard’s version where the major action is off stage and two nobodies have to carry the show. 

There is a long tradition of writers focussing on minor characters of major literary works in order to satirize those works as happens in W.S. Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1874), but Stoppard’s play which made him famous was one of the first to use this device for a serious purpose.  This has led to a whole subgenre of works that rewrite a literary work from the point of view of neglected or minor characters.  Recently Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) looked at the events in Homer’s Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus’ long-suffering wife Penelope and Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked (1995), source of the popular musical, looked at L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900), from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard focusses on two characters whose low status and trisyllabic names makes them seem interchangeable to others and even to themselves.  They represent the nobodies that history and tragedy ignore and thus, for Stoppard, have more in common with everyday humanity than the great and powerful.  They primarily pass the time in waiting rather than in performing noteworthy deeds.  Samuel Beckett, of course, made this his topic in Waiting for Godot 13 years before Stoppard and it’s very easy to see that Stoppard views his title characters as the Vladimir and Estragon of Hamlet.  Like Beckett’s two tramps, Stoppard's two courtiers have nothing to do but wait and pass the time in games and role-playing.  Like Beckett’s tramps, the two feel compelled to wait because they have been “summoned” and the fact that they think they are needed is one of the only aspects of their lives that give them any meaning.  Beckett’s tramps, however, are caught in a never-ending cycle of being told to wait to no purpose, while Stoppard’s courtiers are caught in the machinery of a plot completely out of their control that ends in their deaths. 

Director Joseph Ziegler, who directed Hamlet for Soulpepper in 2005 and played Pozzo in Waiting for Godot for Soulpepper in 2004, focusses so much on relating Stoppard’s play to Beckett’s that he seems to forget to relate it to Shakespeare’s.  One result is that Stoppard’s two courtiers seem more like young versions of Beckett’s tramps in Elizabethan costume than they do as Hamlet’s old friends from his schooldays at the University of Wittenberg.  Ziegler clearly views Guildenstern (Jordan Pettle) as the Vladimir of the pair since he is given to philosophizing, particularly in the form of medieval syllogisms.  Rosencrantz (Ted Dykstra) thus becomes Stoppard’s Estragon, who cares more about the here and now of the material world.

I have often criticized Pettle’s tendency not to articulate clearly and to rush his speech.  At the beginning of the play he seems to keep these issues in mind and speaks slowly and clearly.  However, as the play progresses, he lapses into his old habits again.  It makes it very difficult to accept Pettle as the fussy intellectual of the pair when he expresses himself saying “gonna”, “wanna” and “shoulda”.  A larger problem is that Pettle may speak Guildenstern’s words, but he never convinces us that he fully understands what he is saying.

With Dykstra, the problem is clearly one of direction.  We know the subtlety Dykstra can achieve as in his own solo show The Kreutzer Sonata (2010).  Here, no doubt in an attempt to heighten the comedy, Ziegler has directed Dykstra to play the Rosencrantz as if he were an idiot, and worse, one who uses a funny high-pitched voice and mugs constantly.  Guildenstern’s lofty philosophizing should seem to be brought down to earth by Rosencrantz’s practicality.  He may be duller that his companion, but he did also go to Wittenberg.  To play him as an idiot makes nonsense of several scenes.  Rosencrantz’s long meditation on death is one of the key serious scenes of the play and Rosencrantz could never play the lightning quick grammatical “Question Game” with Guildenstern if he is as dumb as Ziegler makes him.                   

   

Since the two title characters take up most of the stage time in Stoppard’s play, to have both performances flawed has a serious negative impact.  Pettle and Dykstra do not convey the rapport essential to this duo nor to they generate much sympathy even though they are supposed to be the Everyman figures who represent us.  Since Ziegler allows them to speak in such a modern colloquial manner, every time they speak the lines Shakespeare has given them with the characters of Hamlet, the effect is jarring, as if they were not part of that world at all.

Fortunately, the entire remainder of the cast is excellent.  Beside the title pair, the main minor Shakespearean character who becomes a major character in Stoppard is the First Player whose troupe performs the play “The Mousetrap” for the court and causes Claudius and Gertrude such distress.  Kenneth Welsh is a joy in this role.  He reveals that beneath the Player’s natural bent toward pomposity is the realization that his troupe is less than successful but will soldier on anyway.  Paolo Santalucia is very funny as the boy who specializes in women’s parts and who is resigned to his fate of selling his body to help support the troupe.  The best part in the play is the Players’ staging of the rehearsal of the complete “Mousetrap” (cut short , of course, in Hamlet), where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don’t even recognize themselves in the play or how they will be betrayed.

Diego Matamoros and Nancy Palk make a fine Claudius and Gertrude and William Webster an excellent Polonius.  Gregory Prest is not yet ready to essay Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but as Stoppard’s Hamlet he is perfectly fine. 

The play is performed in the round, a configuration that Soulpepper should use more often in the Baillie Theatre since it places the audience so much closer to the action.  Dana Osborne’s Elizabethan costumes are gorgeous.  It’s ironic that about the only time you ever get to see Hamlet set in that period is when it is part of Stoppard’s play.  As for her sets, the one jarring note is the modern deck chair and umbrella she gives Hamlet on the trip to England.  Kevin Lamotte’s lighting helps heighten the play’s theatricality and makes the point about man’s journey into oblivion better than do the actors.  

An example of what the play could have been like comes near the end and from an unexpected quarter.  Tim Ziegler, son of the director, plays Horatio on a stage littered with the dead of Shakespeare’s last scene.  He speaks so clearly and so movingly that he displays a level of engagement with his role completely lacking in the two principals.  So far, the best production of Rosencrantz that I have seen in Canada is the one Douglas Beattie directed for Touchmark Theatre in Guelph in 2009 starring Damian Atkins and Shane Carty.  Unlike the present Soulpepper production, Beattie’s maintained a fine balance between comedy and tragedy and kept the key point always in view that no matter how much the title pair may discuss whether the world is ruled by chance of fate, they are destined for swift and unexpected death as soon as the action begins simply because they are part of a story with a predetermined course.  There should be a sense of mystery and darkness in this play just as there should be in Hamlet.

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Ted Dykstra and Jordan Pettle. ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit http://soulpepper.ca.