Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 12 Oct 2019

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

 

The place:  Birmingham Rep.

The date:   1970

The occasion:  My first experience of a ‘serious’ live play

The play:  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

I should perhaps one other shorthand note:

The impact:  Astonishment

 

For a boy raised on television drama, an encounter with an absurdist comedy was as bewildering and alien as it’s possible to get when it comes to the theatre experience. Until this play my only trips to any theatre had been to see ‘end of pier’ comedy shows whilst on holiday in Margate – does anyone remember Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd? Ugh…

In truth I haven’t grown up to be a big theatre-goer; I’m one of those odd people who prefers to read plays rather than watch them. Perhaps this is just an extension of my extraordinary sloth or it could be that I’ve always found theatre seats grotesquely uncomfortable but whatever the reason I love creating the play in my own mind rather than watching someone-else’s interpretation.

But there’s no denying that a good performance of a play can be an extraordinary experience and there are a handful of such plays that I will be eternally grateful I’ve seen done so well. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is certainly one of those.

Returning to the text again after a very long break, I was delighted to have the feeling of entering an the oddly familiar world of an old friend. Literary critics will tell you that this is a piece of ‘meta-theatre’ – which is a sort of shorthand for a structure that acts like a hall of mirrors: a drama within a drama within a drama. RGAD features two ‘minor’ characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard spins a life for the two of them ‘in the wings’ as it were, playing out a surreal drama of their own as both Hamlet and the play-within-a –play inside Hamlet roll along.

Although the world of R&G is comically absurd, it’s also a dark universe of uncertainty in which the shadow of randomness and mortality seem to overshadow everything. In a world where all the usual certainties become uncertain, what can you hang on to? From the very outset, as the two central characters toss coins and defy the laws of probability, we know we’ve entered a world not just of absurdity but of artifice.

Stoppard is also exploring the relationship between theatre and reality and how art interacts with experience. The brutality of reality may be offset by art but ultimately that reality asserts itself:

"No one gets up after death—there is no applause—there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death."

The three-act play is a delight to read because it rattles along on sparkling, rapid-fire dialogue and one liners. Periodically Stoppard appropriates some of the Shakespearean dialogue of Hamlet as his characters move into that universe, touch and warp away into their separate space.

I now find it impossible to read the play without being conscious of another of my dramatic epiphanies, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. The existentialist core of both plays share similar characteristics and rely on creating a sort of comedy double act that undermines the usual comic conventions and in the process undermines our own view of ourselves in the so-called real world.

I know there are plenty of people who find plays hard to read or might never even consider picking up a play as a recreational read but if you find yourself in one of these categories you might want to see whether R&GAD can challenge those expectations. It’s a ripping, funny and unsettling read and I still love it.

 

Terry Potter

October 2019