© RLT 2006

Past performances: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
By Tom Stoppard

Directed by Darla Biccum
Show dates: October 15-18, 2003

Cast & Production Team
Synopsis
About the playwright
Production photos

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Cast			Production Team
Actor	Role		Team Member	Role
Josh Strait	Rosencrantz		Darla Biccum	Director
Ryan MacLeod	Guildenstern		Pat Wilson	Stage Manager
Melodi Hawkesford	The Player		Andrea McNeil	ASM *
Jadon Rempel	Hamlet		Jolaine Huber	Prompter
Meghan Pederson	Ophelia		Carol Krieser	Costumes
Tony Cuylle	Claudius		Melanie Little	Dresser
Sally Bryant Tubello	Gertrude
Ken Ludwig	Polonius
Marie Degenstein	Soldier, Tragedian
Jodi Sadowsky	Horatio, Tragedian
David Mark	Alfred (Tragedian)
Michelle Biden	Tragedian
Colleen Hawkesford	Tragedian
Jolene Higgins	Tragedian
Kim Oberthier	Tragedian

* ASM - Assistant Stage Manager

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Synopsis of play
By generously skewing the perspectives of a Shakespearean play, Tom Stoppard created a modern theatrical masterpiece. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead looks at Hamlet from the point-of-view of two extremely minor characters. They get their chance to take the lead role and end up running afoul in a world where reality and illusion mingle like dinner guests.

The two meander in and out of Hamlet's plotlines, eventually happening onto a path of their own, where they will meet a tragic, but inevitable, doom.

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About the playwright
Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and was raised in England, left school at age 17, bored with academics and began working for small newspapers. He was made a theatre critic, and he gradually learned that he loved the theatre.  He says, however, that he was a terrible critic: he was under the impression that art was an objective business, and judged it accordingly.  He began to feel he would be better off writing plays.

At twenty-three he wrote his own first play, A Walk on the Water , but he now considers it so unoriginal that he counts his next play, The Gamblers , as his real first play.  Stoppard says he is a notorious procrastinator, and his plays tend to be written the way a student "crams" for an exam. He notes the constant problem with writing: one cannot know what to write until on begins. Yet he is prolific. He has written dozens of plays and numerous screenplays.

In 1967 he introduced Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. It was his first major play, and is perhaps still his most famous. Although Stoppard is criticized for his supposed overuse of flashy words and ideas, this same showy wordplay has brought him much admiration from most critics. Most of his plays are filled with light jokes, but they deal with dense subjects.

He is generally a widely respected popular playwright and is also comfortable with writing for mass audiences.  He has won three Tony awards, in 1968 for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , in 1976 for Travesties , and in 1984 for The Real Thing. He wrote the screenplay for the movie Shakespeare in Love, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes, and won an Oscar for it in 1998. He wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, Empire of the Sun, and Billy Bathgate, among others.  He may have left school out of boredom, but he has written on extremely varied/complex subjects, like poetry, love, history, math, philosophy, and physics.  As he says of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead :

. whatever else it is, (it) is a comedy.  My intention was comic, and if the play had not turned out funny I would have considered that I had failed. Quite a lot of solemn and scholarly stuff has been written about it, which is fine and flattering, but it is worth bearing in mind that among the productions staged all over the world, two were comparative failures and both of these took the play very seriously, indeed.

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Production photos

Ryan MacLeod, Josh Strait and Melodi Hawkesford.

Josh Strait, Tony Cuylle, Sally Bryant Tubello, Meghan Pederson, Michelle Biden, Jolene Higgins, Colleen Hawkesford.

(Clockwise from top): Michelle Biden, Jodi Sadowsky, Sally Bryant Tubello, David Mark, Jolene Higgins, Marie Degenstein, Colleen Hawkesford, Melodi Hawkesford, Kim Oberthier.

Melodi Hawkesford, Ryan MacLeod, Josh Strait.

Ryan MacLeod, Jadon Rempel, Josh Strait.

David Mark and Melodi Hawkesford.

 

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