• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (National Theatre Live)

5/29/18 (Tues), Tokyo

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get their day again in the Old Vic’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s through-the-looking-glass take on Hamlet, broadcast as part of the great National Theatre Live series. I always thought that Beckett did the two-man existential comedy act with more punch and efficiency, but R&G is a fun ride nevertheless and with funnier lines to boot (“We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people” “[He’s] stark raving sane” “Life is a gamble with terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it” “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily… that is what Tragedy means”). Its concept of diving into a classic through its minor characters is feeling its age, partly because of the many imitations it has spawned (Wicked, anyone?), and the part with the players is a hippie touch stuck in the 1960s, saved only by a fabulously flamboyant performance by David Haig as the lead player. But the dazzling wordplay and audaciousness of the interaction between Shakespeare’s fictional world and Stoppard’s own are as fresh as ever. The characters not only break the fourth wall, slyly acknowledging the audience, but the internal wall as well by commenting on the action we know from Hamlet (“He’s talking to himself again”); the plays actually coincide at times when Hamlet, Ophelia or others come intruding into this play with lines from the original show. While a knowledge of Hamlet is not strictly necessary, it enhances the experience immeasurably, even in small touches like this exchange on the “not to be” half of the famous phrase:

G: Death is “not.” Death isn’t. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not be on a boat.

R: I’ve frequently not been on boats.

G: No, no… What you’ve been is not on boats.

Putting such lines across isn’t as simple as it sounds, and the show was well served in its title pairing. Daniel Radcliffe, looking very smart with a trim beard, gets better with every production, and here he is well cast as the dimmer light of the two (“I’m only good at support”) – I can’t remember whether he is R or G, but they don’t usually remember either. He projects an amiable innocence that is just right as a kid who life happens to, a young guy on a drifting boat over which he has no control. He comes through beautifully on my favorite speech (“Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death?”) as well as the other big death monologue about the coffin. Nice.

He is well matched by Joshua McGuire as the boisterous half of the duo whose take-charge attitude never quite tips over into action. His restless energy is a good contrast with Radcliffe’s more befuddled take. Their rapid-fire exchanges are expertly delivered, no easy feat given the density of the language. (I’m not sure whether it was deliberate, but the fact that they are also the same diminutive height somehow adds to their isolation among the crowd.)

It is Haig, however, who steals every scene he thunders into, as when he demonstrates that a theatrical death is realer for most of us than the actual thing. He went beyond the easy route of old ham to something more slimy: player, pimp, lecher, philosopher (“Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get”) and whatever he needed to be to get what he wanted. I winced when the pierrot-looking troupe made their appearance, afraid we were about to get a mime performance, but Haig was so dominant that the rest didn’t matter.

Director David Leveaux, a familiar face here in Tokyo (most recently with Mishima’s wacky 1960s concoction The Black Lizard earlier this year), kept things simple with a bare cloud-covered stage in the first half and a simple boat-looking structure in the second. He maintained a buoyant pace that deftly navigated the highjinks without sacrificing the serious themes of life’s randomness and the finality of death.

I was surprised to learn that there is a film version directed by Stoppard himself. The material seems too resolutely theatrical (or meta-theatrical) to capture in a two-dimensional format, and I’m curious to see what he’s done with it. In any event, this stage production is about as good as it gets, and I’d be shocked if it didn’t get to New York with these leads. A big thumbs up.