When the two knives of Shakespearean drama emerge from the shadows, they do not act. Propelled to the foreground of the play by the Englishman Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern leave the corners Hamlet where their function was limited to watching over the Prince of Denmark and escorting him to England. Where (but they knew not) Hamlet was to be killed by order of King Claudius. Where (in the end) it was they and not their prisoner who were to be executed.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Had they been a little more intuitive, they would have undoubtedly escaped their fate. But then they wouldn’t have become this pair of abandoned heroes whose questions follow one another in a tight stream without ever finding answers to the point of leading the audience astray in a maze where words, actions and situations are different, a hermeticism bordering on philosophical-metaphysical enigma.
Written in 1966, this British UFO wanted to redress the indignation of shadowy figures who felt (we understand from Stoppard’s pen) neglected by Shakespeare.
Theoretical puzzle
The result? A discontinuous and topsy-turvy drama. A comedy permeated by the soul of Pirandello (the actors are looking for their characters, the characters are looking for their author, everyone is looking for their audience) and innervated by the spirit of Beckett (there is Godot in these Shakespearean courtiers). In short, a play whose form bears no allegiance to anything the theater offers today. No linearity, no psychology, an abrupt way of jumping from rooster to donkey, commenting on the theater being made and, as it is analyzed, destroying it, a writing that favors the fragment over the story and prefers the deconstruction of harmony. .
Contemporary ears emerge disturbed from this dramaturgical enterprise in which truths collapse before the waltz of theatrical and metatheatrical assumptions. It’s not that the play is bad, but rather that we understand nothing, or next to nothing, about this theoretical conundrum. Except, perhaps, for one thing: if Tom Stoppard’s project was to get the audience into the troubled brains of his protagonists who are themselves trying to get involved in Hamlet’s madness, then he has succeeded beyond hope.
This intriguing text was staged in France in 1967 by Claude Régy with twenty-one actors on stage. Ten years later, only three actors will play it under director Jean-François Prévand. This means that it lends itself to various and varied adaptations. At the Théâtre Les Gémeaux, in Sceaux (Hauts-de-Seine), where it is presented, the play brings together seven performers, some of whom take on several characters. They are directed by a 63-year-old Russian, Youri Boutoussov, who is relatively unknown in France, although he has performed almost sixty shows and received an impressive number of awards in his native country.
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