Blimey, three posts in the space of half an hour. You lucky people.
Last night, I went to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Lowry with a couple of friends. A couple more than I was expecting, actually, because I bumped into Lydia from off’f the Just Shoot forums at the tram stop, who was going to see with a friend it for her birthday. Small world.
It’s a very, very clever play: it takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and kind of inverts it from the perspective of the eponymous characters. It opens on the pair tossing coins, which repeatedly come up heads: this sets the theme for the play – the protagonists are aware that they’re being dragged along by events outside of their control, but they don’t understand how or for what purpose. Other characters from the play enter and exit their scenes with little apparent explanation, and they try their best to determine the appropriate courses of action – all to no avail as the power of the narrative carries them along regardless. Existentialist themes of choice, the meaning of life and death and the nature of narrative are explored through the characters predicament, and fleshed out further by The Player, the leader of the group of travelling theatricals from Hamlet. The use of Hamlet as a basis – which already makes use of a play within a play – serves to make the themes of narrative and control all the more clever and complex.
All of which combines to form a mindbendingly funny, complex and thought-provoking piece of theater in the true absurdist style.
Now, I should really try and see Waiting for Godot some time.