Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Tom Stoppard's evergreen comic masterpiece


"The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new."
Pauline Kael, "Trash, Art and the Movies" (quote for Gabbie in New York New York ;-)


In Shakespeare's Hamlet, pretty much everyone ends up dead - including the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
In Tom Stoppard's evergreen comic masterpiece, the hapless pair's last days are chronicled; days largely spent trying to make sense of their interactions with other characters as the epic Hamlet unspools just off stage. In the hands of director Simon Phillips, the wit and playfulness of Stoppard's writing will be front and centre.

Tom Stoppard's much-loved play explores the Shakespearian and Beckettian vision of the life we experience as endless play alongside Cold War River and Strangers Dining Rooms in the Taxing Sydney Harbour...

If actors need an audience to make their existence meaningful, as The Player suggests they do in this bohemian play, then it must be a very happy and fulfilled bunch of actors treading the boards at the Sydney Theatre Company.  Tim Minchin and Toby Schmitz impressed even the Chinese guy who had series of micro sleeps on his way to the abyss of death Unstoppable Guildenstern


"'Tis said that courage is common, but the immense esteem in which it is held proves it to be rare."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Courage"