Ros. What are you playing at?
Guil. Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.
Guil. Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.
I’ve often found
myself dumbstruck at the sheer ridiculousness of the largeness of Tom
Stoppard’s capacious intelligence and the wit with which his plays hum and
shimmer. There’s a capriciousness and cheekiness that seems to dance over and
under and through his words and language with a barely containable verve. It’s
a virtuosity that has made him a favourite of critics and audiences. But
underneath his distinctive stylistic flair and mannerisms, there is a serious
engagement and interrogation of not so much issues but ideas. However
disorienting and impenetrable his works may seem on the surface, “the plays are
highly ordered and underpinned with logic and a point of view;” nothing is
accidental, arbitrary or apologetic in Stoppard’s work.
In Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead, written between 1964 and 1966, and first
produced in 1966, Stoppard takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and asks what the relatively minor and interchangeable
characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are doing throughout the course of
the play while they’re not on stage. It’s been variously described as being
‘Beckettian,’ ‘absurdist,’ or ‘absurdist existentialism,’ but the truth is
neither – rather, it’s Stoppardian, and therein lies the key to this, his most
celebrated and produced play. A lot of the existential anguish which seems to
run through Stoppard’s work is not, as has been assumed, indicative of a lack
of meaning in the world. Rather, it is a lack of adequate comprehension of the
world and its persistent niggling questions, and this is not critical but
merely human.
In performance, so
much of Stoppard’s energy and verve is in the rhythm of the words as much as
the words themselves – like the instance in Travesties
when an entire scene is delivered in limerick form. His work is consistently filled with
meta-textual and meta-theatrical allusions and refractions, full of the
connections and implications that emerge from these links as opposed to the inherent
order of the words themselves (though, that too, is often crucial in
understanding Stoppard’s delicious wordplay). He has the gloriously enviable
ability to make you feel totally intellectually inadequate at the same time as
making you feel incredibly clever for getting what he’s on about. However, on
the reverse side of the same coin, he is constantly winking at you, giving you
a slight pause to make sure you get the joke, the reference; make sure you
understand the game.
*
On a set that
fills the normally cavernous Sydney
Theatre
It’s a madcap
romp, in many ways, completely spellbinding and enchanting, and eversoslightly
infuriating in its intellect which it wears rather honestly on its sleeve. I
heard Stoppard’s dialogue described once as like a Möbius strip made from a DNA
double-helix, and this is no exception. As Toby Schmitz and Tim Minchin weave
and wend their merry way through Stoppard’s many tongue-twisting passages, it’s
like watching Olympic athletes or gymnasts at work, they way they make it look
so effortless and so disarmingly hypnotic. Dressed in leather, Schmitz and
Minchin are a pair of stranded souls, trapped in a nowhere place, a kind of
theatrical green-room for Elsinore castle. As
Rosencrantz, Minchin plays up the naïveté inherent in the character, and
sometimes you wonder if he’s acting at all, such is the honesty and
believability of his performance, the credibility of poor Rosencrantz’s
confusion and lack of understanding. As the taller of the two, Schmitz’s
Guildenstern is the assumed leader of the two, and is slightly obnoxious, but
his bemusement and haplessness is similarly enchanting. In true Schmitz
fashion, he completely owns the character and you can see the fun he’s having
with the role and the language in every single second of his performance.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead has been
described as a three-hander, despite its title, such is the status of the
Player’s role in the play’s unfolding. Played by Ewen Leslie as a kind of
braggart troubadour cum pirate, the Player is a swaggering Blackbeard of a fellow,
not without an inherent lecherous menace which beautifully offsets Minchin’s
innocence and Schmitz’s forthrightness. As the leader of the band of
Tragedians, Leslie is every bit the consummate showman he professes his troupe
to be; you could very well believe him commanding his ragtag accomplices to a
performance of anything you may so desire –
Deaths and disclosures, universal and
particular, denouments both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama
on all levels including the suggestive. We transport you into a world of
intrigue and illusion … I can do you blood and
love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the
love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you
love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory-- they're all blood,
you see. (The Player)
The rest of the
Tragedians are an assorted bag of miscreants, minstrels, jesters, mummers and actors,
dressed in variations on medieval pantaloons and jerkins, slippers, tights,
hats, and doublets. Composer Alan John furnished them with a pipe, tabor and
lute, enabling them – much like he did for Company B Belvoir’s immortal Diary of a Madman – to interact with the
action, to ‘score’ the action on-stage and to bring a slice of the Elizabethan
streets to the Sydney Theatre stage in a welcome interjection of humour, warmth
and verve. Steve Francis’ subtle sound design, eversoslightly amplified, meant
that even the quietest moments upstage could be heard throughout the entire
theatre, and this meant that none of Stoppard’s (or Shakespeare’s) delicious
words were lost. Illuminated by Nick Schlieper in warm yellows and burnt
ambers, cool blues and thin spotlights, the lighting helped to create the
illusion of the space as a liminal in-between netherworld, neither here nor
there, a bit like Lear’s blasted heath.
Described by Simon Phillips as a “joyous, smart, outrageously
intricate and bravely despairing play,” Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead is Stoppard’s first great hit, and is has not aged in
its nearly fifty year lifespan. Like Rosencrantz, we know something great and
wondrous is taking shape, but we can’ quite touch it or articulate it. During
the play, as you try to keep up with Stoppard’s rapid-fire tangents and
non-sequiturs, it’s like trying to keep up with a tennis game whose ball you
cannot quite catch sight of (indeed, the verbal tennis match in the play seems
to riff on several lines in Shakespeare’s own Henry V); but rather than leave the theatre exhausted, you walk out exhilarated
and utterly dazzled by his wordiness, verbosity and sheer intellectual
dexterity, the play’s panache. Once you immerse yourself in the world of the play
that Stoppard has created, anything can – and generally does – happen. You have
to let your thoughts and preconceptions go and just exist solely in the moment
of the play. Pretty soon you’ll be soaring, giddy-drunk on words words words.
They are, after
all, all you have to go on, most of the time.
Theatre
playlist: 24. Kemp’s
Jegg, Tarleton’s Jig
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