Uncertainty is the normal state: Furies’ Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Tom Stoppard’s reputation for virtuosic displays of linguistic and intellectual gymnastics has held its ground for the past fifty-odd years, and one of his earliest plays – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – is perhaps the first time we see his talent on display. Described variously as ‘Beckettian,’ ‘absurdist,’ or ‘absurdist existentialism,’ the play takes place in the wings of Hamlet, and asks what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (those relatively minor and interchangeable characters) are doing throughout the course of the play while they’re not on stage. By turns funny, strange, witty, and head-scratchingly dense, the play has become one of Stoppard’s enduring crowd-favourites, and is presented here by independent company Furies in a sparse-but-not-empty production.

Room temperature: STC’s Arcadia

This is a revised version of a piece written for artsHub.

VALENTINE: Heat goes to cold. It’s a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What's happening to your tea is happening to everything everywhere. The sun and the stars. It’ll take a while but we're all going to end up at room temperature.

Known for his wit and wordplay as much as his intellectual rigour (and occasional density), Tom Stoppard’s plays are a marriage of big ideas, drama, and the occasional gimmick, but they never fail to dazzle in one way or another. No matter how dense or impenetrable the science or intellectual debate behind his work is, you generally leave one of his plays “wondering whether you have just been educated or entertained, in the end allowing for the likelihood of both,” as William W. Demastes wrote. Arcadia, written in 1993, is without a doubt Stoppard’s most perfectly constructed play – on a technical level as much as a narrative one – and has led to it, not undeservingly, labelled “the greatest play of our age.” Described by Stoppard himself as “all sex and love and romance and jokes,” Arcadia is at once fiercely intellectual (in typical Stoppard fashion), but it also has a strong emotional counterweight, and manages to combine both of these – through the constant juxtaposition of two time periods, two-hundred-odd years apart – with flair, wit, lightness and, ultimately, poignancy. Presented here by Sydney Theatre Company, Richard Cottrell’s Arcadia certainly looks handsome, but like Mr Noakes’ improved Newcomen steam engine, it doesn’t quite reflect the sum of the energy and care that has gone into it, and “repays eleven pence in the shilling at most.”

Uncertainty is the normal state: STC’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Ros. What are you playing at?
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.

On Reading, Part Three

The reason why there hasn’t been one of these for a while is not that I haven’t read anything, the truth couldn’t be further from it, but the fact that nothing I’ve read has been truly stand-outish, anything particularly noteworthy. Sure, there have been enjoyable books and mediocre books, but none of them truly rated a mention here. One exception is, of course, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.