Seattle Theatre Skyline



Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead


Posted by on 31 Jan 2012 / 3 Comments


First of all, I want to commend Seattle Public Theatre for their courage in tackling weighty material. At a time when so many companies seek to appeal to audiences by offering them the dramatic equivalent of a McDonald’s happy meal, it’s great to see a local theatre offer more substantive and intellectually nourishing fare on the menu.

 In just the past year, SPT has tackled heavyweights like Shaw and Mamet, and they are currently taking on another brainy work, Tom Stoppard’s contemporary classic, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

 Directed by Shana Bestock and featuring Angela DiMarco and Alyssa Keene in the title roles, the play is an existential spin-off of Hamlet, combined with the absurdity of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. 

 Stoppard takes two relatively insignificant characters from Shakespeare’s finest tragedy and elevates them to the status of protagonists in a self-conscious meta-drama that rehashes the thematic preoccupations of Absurdism. In other words, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ARE Didi and Gogo set in the darkened wings of the Elizabethan stage where they wait for something to happen.

 Rounding out this Shakespearian-Beckettian mélange are “The Player,” (played by Heather Hawkins), a Pozzo-esque troupe leader, and her bohemian company of players, who, in turn, are much akin to Beckett’s “Lucky” in Godot.

 So how do you take a play with this much intertextuality and historicity, and make something new of it? Bestock’s primary approach was to cast women in the main roles, –a noble pursuit given the traditional dearth of meaty roles for women on stage and screen –, but that’s about it. And to be clear, DiMarco and Keene handled the characters beautifully, but I don’t think that casting women really offered any new perspective per se.

 And as with other productions of classic plays at SPT, the staging remains traditional and safe. This is an issue in American theatre in general that I have brought up many times in other reviews. The prison of realism and a maniacal fidelity to the text impedes directors from realizing the autonomy of the art of mise-en-scène. It is only the courageous director who heralds Barthes’ infamous proclamation of the “death of the author” who can ultimately bring new vision to what Beckett termed in Murphy a situation where “the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”

 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead plays January 27th-February 19th at the historic Bathouse Theatre on Green Lake. Show times are Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30. Sunday matinees at 2pm. 7312 W. Green Lake Drive North. Ph. 206-524-1300. www.seattlepublictheater.org.

Written by Scott Taylor

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  • Keith

    “..a maniacal fidelity to the text…’?  Yeah, like someone is going to get sued for altering the text.  That’s called a contractual obligation, friend.  And let’s face it…who’s going to think they are a better playwright than Tom Stoppard?  Please.

  • SPT subscriber

     I thought sticking to the text was what you were
    supposed to do, not rewrite the script when Stoppard had done such a
    brilliant job of it.     
     
    I strongly disagree that the only new
    slant to the current Bathhouse production  is casting women in roles traditionally
    assigned to men.   Casting the best actors who audition isn’t actually a
    new slant on anything and I thought it was mostly to have strong actors
    in the parts that led the director to cast the three women in top roles. This isn’t really a “slant” since their gender isn’t really relevant to the
    course of the play and casting women does’nt change the meaning of the
    Stoppard.   If one was directing Othello
    and chose to make Iago and Othello homosexuals in a
    love-relationship-gone-bad, that might be a new slant.   The play would mean
    something a bit different.   But when you cast women in parts where
    gender makes no difference, it  isn’t a slant.   The only significant
    part of it is that three dynamic actresses got juicy parts usually given
    to men but the meaning of the play is mostly unchanged.  

    But I thought Shana Bestock did have a unique  “slant” in having the brilliant
    lines pile on top of each other instead of being separated by weighty
    pauses and I thought it was absolutely wonderful and very different from
    the previous versions I’ve seen.  It made the whole thing work for me. 
    So thanks to SPT for having a unique slant on the play that made it sparkle
    and entertain far more than other versions. 
     

  • Ian

    Thanks for the feedback and for taking the time to read my review. I
    want to clarify what I mean by “maniacal fidelity to the text.” In no
    way am I suggesting changing Stoppard’s words. I am suggesting that the
    staging could have been dared to diverge from the norm. Bestock was
    trying to do this by casting women in the lead roles, but she didn’t go
    far enough as far as I’m concerned. There has been a revolution in
    declaring the autonomy of the art of mise-en-scène, especially in
    Europe, but less so in America. Directors like Artaud, Brecht, and even
    more recently Mnouchkine, Le Coq, Boal, and many others have taken up
    this cause, and have stopped revering the playwright as a sort of
    omniscient “god.” They have declared a language that is unique to the
    stage that goes beyond the text, and consequently have offered up
    innovative and drastically different productions of works, particularly
    classic works, — and Stoppard’s play IS a contemporary classic. It is
    not a question of “changing the words,” but rather creating a new style
    of staging that alters the way text has traditionally been presented.

    “Sticking to the text” suggests that doing theatre is tantamount to following a recipe. I say we need more chefs and less cooks.