RGD

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

"wonderfully engaging"
Christopher Hoile, Stage Door

Written by Tom Stoppard, featuring Damien Atkins, Shane Carty, Alison Deon, Michèle Kaye, David Mackett, Patric Masurkevitch, Andrew Sabiston, Lara Rose Tansey, Brian Tree and Eric Woolfe in the cast. The production was directed and designed by Douglas Beattie with lighting by Eric Goudie. Charlotte Gowdy was assistant director. Michael Hart was the stage manager, assisted by Shelby-Jai Donkers.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead ran for 5 performances, February 19 - 22, 2009.

Presented by River Run Centre and Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts with funding from the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Guelph and the Guelph Community Foundation's Musagetes Fund.

The Play
An absurdist tragi-comedy by contemporary theatre's most dazzling wordsmith - Shakespeare's Hamlet as experienced by its two most forgettable characters. When we first meet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, dressed as courtiers but behaving like the comic tramps from Beckett's Waiting for Godot, they know only that they've been summoned to the Royal Court and that time is mysteriously out of joint. Their brushes with other Hamlet characters, notably the tragic prince himself and the troupe of actors who rehearse The Murder of Gonzago to play before King Claudius, are the main incidents of the play. The dramatic action concerns their gradual realization that they themselves are "marked" for tragedy. Hilarious and chilling by turns, the play has been produced in countless revivals around the world since its professional debut in 1967. In 1990 it was adapted and directed by the playwright himself as a feature film.

From Touchmark's Press Release dated February 1, 2009:
Stratford Festival favourite Brian Tree (Player) and award-winning Toronto actor/playwright Eric Woolfe (Hamlet) have appeared in Touchmark productions before. Damien Atkins (Guildenstern) and Shane Carty (Rosencrantz) will make their Touchmark debuts. Mr. Carty played prominent or leading roles in three recent Stratford seasons (the King in Love's Labour's Lost and Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov among them) and is a graduate of Stratford's Birmingham Conservatory. Mr. Atkins' recent credits include Frost/Nixon for CanStage; The Way of the World, The Caretaker, King Lear and The Importance of Being Earnest for Soulpepper. He also played the creator of the hit musical in season three of the popular TV series Slings and Arrows.

Alison Deon (Ophelia), Michèle Kaye (Alfred), David Mackett (Player King), Patric Masurkevitch (Polonius), Andrew Sabiston (Claudius) and Lara Rose Tansey (Gertrude) round out the cast.

Playwright
Journalist, novelist and drama critic Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) was thirty years old when his debut play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead took London's theatre scene by storm in 1967. Ronald Bryden, influential critic for the Observer, greeted the play as "the most brilliant debut by a young playwright since John Arden's... punning, far-fetched, leaping from depth to dizziness". Its Broadway opening later the same year met with similarly enthusiastic plaudits and won the 1968 Tony Award for Best Play. With his name established Stoppard went on to become one of the most consistently successful and praised playwrights of the last forty years, winning no fewer than seven Best New Play awards between 1967 and 1997. His other titles include The Real Inspector Hound (1968), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), and The Invention of Love (1997).

Director's Note
Suppose your life is as a minor character in a play. The author has given you the sketchiest of "back stories", a personality and rapport with another character. Having invented you, he is about to "bring you on". How will you act? Can you believe what other characters tell you about yourself? Presumably you have a purpose; how will you know what it is? Should you limit yourself to following instructions or be spontaneous and pursue your own bent?

Rosencrantz and Guldenstern are trapped in the tragic universe of Shakespeare's Hamlet (c. 1600), just as the comic tramps Gogo and Didi are trapped in the absurd and impenetrable universe of Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952). They are "caught up" in Shakespeare's action. What will become of them? How will it end? And, finally, will there be an explanation?

Reviews
Seven of us attended your wonderful production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead on Sunday and three hours later we were still talking about it. Everything - acting, text, set, costume, movement - was point on. Thank you for lifting Guelph's artistic sights to a higher plane.
Nancy Coates, Guelph

The level of quality of Touchmark productions has always rivalled the best of Stratford, the Shaw Festival or Soulpepper, but this year's production generates that perfect sense of rapport among the main actors that shifts the whole work to an even higher plane.

In Shane Carty and Damien Atkins, Beattie has found the ideal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern... Carty shines in this comic role in a way he never had a chance to in his years at Stratford. The combination of his sturdy body type and mellifluous voice with Rosencrantz's general air of cluelessness is delightfully funny throughout. Meanwhile, Atkins, too, gives one of his finest comic performances, giving us the notion that Guildenstern senses the futility of his speculations even as he indulges in them, this futility growing to a greater feeling of dread as the play continues.

Carty and Atkins are supported by an excellent cast led by Brian Tree... Tree commands the stage and gives The Player just the right edge of pomposity which drops to simple anger when the duo fails to understand him...

The Hamlet cast is also a fine one with Eric Woolfe as Hamlet filled with a pent-up anger whenever he meets his two former schoolmates since he knows they were "sent for", that is, to spy on him. Andrew Sabiston is a raging Claudius, Patric Masurkevitch a comic Polonius, Lara Rose Tansey a not-so-innocent Gertrude and Alison Deon an Ophelia near to an emotional breakdown. David Mackett is The Player King and Michèle Kaye is Alfred, the name Stoppard gives the boy actor who plays The Player Queen. The dumbshow they rehearse is one of the best stagings of the scene I've ever seen, with fluid, expressive stylized gestures...

Beattie's set design is very simple. We in the audience are conceived of as being at the back of the stage looking past the backs of wooden legs on either side of a proscenium opening into a darkened auditorium, an effect largely achieved through Eric Goudie's effective lighting through a black scrim...

Beattie and his cast have got this play exactly right and the comic rapport between Carty and Atkins as the titular anti-heroes is priceless. Theatre-lovers residing outside Guelph should make a point of adding Touchmark's productions to their theatre calendars or risk missing some of the most insightfully directed shows in Southern Ontario.
Christopher Hoile, Stage Door

Damien Atkins as Guildenstern, Shane Carty as Rosencrantz and Brian Tree as The Player are all excellent, along with many others. Douglas Beattie added his own careful and creative dimension... The sparse stage decor was gracious and appropriate, the costume selections, wonderful.
Irena Syrokomla, Echo Germanica

I loved it! It's one of my favourite plays - and those two did a fabulous job! I took a chance bringing my in-laws as their tastes are not the same as mine, and everyone really enjoyed it. And what a great house on Sunday - very responsive!
Jill Grantmyre, Guelph