Tom Clarke and Freya Finch as the titular Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Photo / Andi Crown
Auckland Theatre Company's revival of the show that captured the swinging spirit of the 1960s highlights UK playwright Tom Stoppard's brilliant sense of theatricality.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead flips the script on Shakespeare's gloomy masterpiece Hamlet and offers tantalising glimpses of how it might appear to a pair of
bit part players who feel trapped in a world without meaning.
The play still resonates as a significant artefact of the Absurdist tradition but it also reminds us that many of the things which were outrageously rebellious in the 1960s are now almost banal. I
n the age of Reality TV, for example, it seems quaint to find so much angst expended on the idea that seemingly spontaneous actions might actually be scripted moments controlled by an unseen, vaguely sinister entity.
The pair in the title roles do a good job of handling Stoppard's dazzling wit and erudite philosophical musings. Tom Clarke's Rosencrantz is comically perplexed with random mood swings taking us from screeching intensity to moments of flippant irony while Freya Finch's Guildenstern brings clarity to the existential speculations.
