Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are…

… onstage at Soulpepper?

Tom Stoppard’s plays are something of a paradox for me. I enjoy reading them; on that basis, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of my favourite plays. It’s also really fun to perform: my friends Dave and Diana and I included a scene from it in the drama project we put together at the end of high school, and learning the back-and-forth snappy banter lines of the “Play at Questions” scene was a blast.

But the Stoppard productions I’ve seen leave me fidgeting guiltily in my seat, regardless of the quality of the actors, the superiority of which is usually indicated by the fact that the rest of the audience members around me are giggling. The clever, philosophical witticisms that shine on the page actually take time onstage, and I get impatient: why are these people getting in the way of my precious words? Stoppard can be so intellectual, so abstract, that I often feel like there’s little the actors can add.

In contrast, the scenes of Stoppard’s that don’t quite play right as read — the physical comedy, the music, and the magic tricks — do shine in live performance. But for me, the payoff of those sections isn’t rewarding enough to counterbalance the frustration of the talking-metaphysical-heads parts.

To be scrupulously fair, before I get into the actual production I saw and how it made me feel, I must note that I know Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead pretty well, well enough to remember most of the aside-instructions Stoppard includes for the actors, include character notes like how Rosencrantz feels about taking money off Guildenstern or how Guildenstern is supposed to say a particular line. That often distracted me while watching the show, because I found that I was waiting to see how closely the actors matched the impression Stoppard wrote that he was trying to give rather than appreciating the performances they were actually giving.

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist cross between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. We spend our time with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two confused courtiers, as they bumble around wondering who they are, what they’re doing, and what their existence means. It’s a little bit Hamlet from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s perspective (another scrupulously fair note: I have played Guildenstern in a production of Hamlet, so I do know what it’s like to be “backstage” on that story.), and a little bit life from minor characters’ perspectives. It’s also a lot dense wordplay and metaphysics, because when our boys have nothing to do, they like to make elaborate jokes and talk about death.

The Soulpepper production is everything one might hope a production could be. What special effects it has are pulled off without a hitch; the sound design (by Mike Ross) is evocative; the in-the-round staging is intriguing; and the performers tackle their roles with gusto. In particular, the tragedians and their leader, the player, are a magnetic, ramshackle group who easily steal the scene onstage.

Ted Dykstra and Jordan Pettle are convincing, and entertaining as the titular characters. I’ve heard it said that the hallmark of a good performer is how well he or she can act during someone else’s lines; both Dykstra and Pettle have a lot of listening to do in this play, and they do it well. They handle the sometimes stilted Stoppard dialogue ably. Dykstra’s Rosencrantz is childish and whiny but also brave and compassionate; Pettle’s Guildenstern is anxious and self-absorbed but also desperately clinging to his friend.

The biggest problem with this play is that the characters, as written, just aren’t that compelling as people instead of ideas. When I watch the show, I feel like I hear the voice of the author breaking through over and over as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern note that they have nothing to do, or that they’re going in circles, or that their conversation is growing stale in ways that, to my ear, sound like a writer trying to figure what’s going wrong with his script. (It makes me wonder: how much of this show depends on novelty? Would I like it better or hear it differently if each word were new to me?)

The reviewer in the Globe and Mail notes that the heart of the play is its bromance, but I’m not sure I can agree, because, as written, the emotional connections between the characters feel barely there. They hardly listen to each other. One often goes on and on in depth about some abstruse topic while the other pays little attention. The two protagonists are indeed partners in purgatory, but part of their hell seems Sartre-esque: they don’t have much in common except for their suffering, and they seem to antagonize each other rather than offer comfort. At the end, they’re alone.

Maybe I also find it difficult to sympathize with our duo because it’s hard to feel sorry for someone who isn’t the captain of his own fate when we never see him try to take charge of the ship. Soulpepper’s in-the-round staging emphasizes the wide range of possibilities open to these characters — and yet, faced with the opportunity to run away, do something new, they don’t even make the attempt. In some ways, this makes them more believable as Hamlet’s friends (after all, when did the royal scion of Denmark ever make a decision without worrying away at it for several scenes in advance?), but it’s still jarring.

In the end, I’ll always love Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for its cleverness in book form, and I admire the craft and ability of the performers in this version. But something about the show — something I suspect is written in — feels dead to me in production instead of more alive, which isn’t what I look for in theatre.