the moment to
say no
by Douglas Messerli
Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (New York: Samuel French,
1967)
Tom Stoppard (writer and director) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead /
1990Guil: Yes.
Ros: That’s why we’re here (He looks round, seems doubtful.
then the explanation) Travelling
Guil: Yes.
Ros: (Dramatically) It was urgent—a matter of extreme urgency,
a royal
summons, his very words: official business an
no
questions asked—lights in the stable-yard, saddle up
and off
headlong and hotfoot across the land, our guides
outstripped
us in breakneck pursuit of our duty! Fearfullest we come too late!
Guil: Too late for what?
Ros: How do I know? We
haven’t got there yet.Guil: Then what are we doing here, I ask myself.
Ros: You might well ask.
Guil: We better get on.
Their “getting on,” however is harder than one might expect as they
encounter, in a play within a play, a group of performing actors who attempt to
play out a play very similar to the play they are living within. Once they do
reach Elsinore, moreover, Hamlet himself is playing with “words, words, words,”
as large groups of people come and go, vaguely ordering the pair to note
Hamlet’s behavior and comments. Yet, since these minor figures have few
encounters with the Danish Prince, most of what they observe is “offstage,”
through the cracks of walls, leaving them more confused than ever.
One of the great delights of Stoppard’s play is that despite this
couple’s inability to know even which of them is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
what their relationship is to each other (they are simply a “couple,” although
the playwright in determining that suggests perhaps something more than a deep
friendship), or what their true relationship is to Hamlet; they are simply told
they are old school friends.

The irony, of course, is that the audience already knows their fate—the
fate of nearly everyone within the play and everyone sitting in the audience as
well, which the playwright (just in case someone may have never read Hamlet) announces in the title itself.
Consequently the substance of the play depends upon their not-knowing, despite their intense cleverness, revealed,
particularly, in their philosophical and scientific thinking. The great
pleasure of Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern Are Dead, in short, is its Beckett-like representation of two
clueless everymen who trip through the language like clowns in their attempts
to comprehend their imposed reality.
It may be a basic trope—played out in numerous characters from Bouvard
and Pecuchet, Vladimir and Estragon, and even Abbott and Costello—but it works,
at least on stage and page, because of its basic dialogical rhythms, which is
at the heart of theater.
At the heart of film, however, is the image, and transforming a work of
“words, words, words,” despite the fact that the playwright remained in
complete control of this film, is most difficult. While the play begins
immediately with the toss of a coin (reinstating the themes of game and
chance), Stoppard’s movie version begins with a long ride through time and
space, with an even longer vertical dip by Guildenstern to reach down for a
coin he has spotted upon the ground. In these visual maneuvers, everything
changes, and what once was clever and witty—what once was based on “timing”—is
slowed down in narrative pace. By the time Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get
into their dialogue, the audience has lost attention, and the characters seem
leaden.
I never saw the original production (my companion, Howard, did see it,
however, at the Alvin Theater in New York), but I am certain behind the verbal
gymnastics of the original actors was a great deal of joy; in the film,
although Gary Oldman (as Rosencrantz) and Tim Roth (as Guildenstern) are fine
actors, they seem to approach their verbal roles so diffidently that they
appear more as dolts rather than swordsmen of language.
The busy costumes and sets of the players, moreover, distract us from
any comments with which the two may joust. The abused child-actor Alfred is
converted into a knowledgeable drag-queen, removing some of the naughty sting
of the original. And by the time the couple reaches Elsinore, with its
cavernous spaces, almost any linguistic arousal has been dampened.
Strangely, Stoppard encourages this even further by having the seemingly
less intelligent Guildenstern express his intelligence in a series of visual
puns surrounding various physical principles such as Newton’s cradle, Newton’s
law of universal gravitation, the Greek principle of steam power, and the
creation of a bi-wing plane. At moments, these actions seem entertaining, but
once more they slow down the language which is the essential engine of
Stoppard’s play.
Several critics have argued that the film failed because of its attempt
to bring such a high level of language to the screen. But I would argue just
the opposite; it is almost as if the playwright, determining to make the work a
visual manifestation of his story, pulled the plug on the very source of its
energy.

In fact, what Stoppard does is to turn the play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, inside out. Instead of
allowing the obscure figures to become the focus of the play, his cinematic
intrusions of time and space, refocus our attentions onto Hamlet. Richard Dreyfuss and the Lead Player, Iain Glen as Prince
Hamlet, Ian Richards as Polonius, and Joanna Miles as Gertrude are such fine
actors that, speaking Shakespeare’s lines, they dominate the play, and like
this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we are more attracted to the action going on
“onstage” (which might have been described as “offstage” in the original) than
we are the shenanigans of the sparring couple. In short, the movie entirely
loses the focus of the original play, ending up with in the dead center of what
was once a vortex, where, as Wyndham Lewis described it, art becomes abstract.
Accordingly, I believe the language-bound original was less abstract
than Stoppard’s visualization of his work, which is far more representational
than the very human rendering of complex ideas of the original.
By comparison with the “still-lives” portrayed by Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, the lightness of Iain Glen’s acting seems anything but morose.
Even Polonius seems more light on his feet that the two actors at the center of
this filmed version.
Perhaps a “staged” film might have generated more excitement than this
camera-busy “representation” of what once was a verbal delight. The death of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unfortunately, does not occur at the end of
Stoppard’s film, but in its very earliest scenes, and we can only wonder, as does
the comic couple of the title, whether there was a time at the beginning when
they might have said “no” to their excruciating voyage.
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