The play’s the thing. Fifty years after its professional premiere at this very theatre, Tom Stoppard’s philosophical comedy still shines brightly.
It helps that this revival stars Daniel Radcliffe, who is perfectly matched by Joshua McGuire, and that David Leveaux’s production is nimble and inventive. But it is the wit of the young Stoppard that keeps the play fresh and alive.
What impresses is the high-wire act that Stoppard undertakes. At any moment you feel the idea of building a whole play around two peripheral figures caught up in events at Elsinore could easily fall apart.
There are, of course, obvious echoes of Beckett in that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are uncertain of their past, puzzled by the present and blind as to the future. But if the play still works, it is because Stoppard strikes an astonishing balance between cross-talk comedy and poignant awareness of mortality.
The comedy comes across well in this production because the two lead actors are so sharply contrasted. Radcliffe’s bearded Rosencrantz is lean, anxious and prone to sudden attacks of panic: McGuire’s clean-shaven Guildenstern is broad-featured, toothy and determined to look on the bright side. Each, at times, partakes of the other’s qualities. But they form a classic double-act whose quickfire exchanges disguise the fact they are both struggling to find identity and purpose in a world that makes little sense.
It is not so much the play’s absurdist philosophy that moves one as its obsession with death. It is Radcliffe’s Rosencrantz who asks, in one of Stoppard’s most resonant lines, “Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death?” and who puzzles as to whether one is aware of non-being. But it is McGuire’s Guildenstern who takes the practical Socratic line that “since we don’t know what death is, it is impossible to fear it”.
Like the Jacobean John Webster, Stoppard is “much possessed by death”. He also pulls off a splendid coup with the mimic stabbing of the Player whose job it is to fake extinction to order. That role is here richly taken by David Haig who suggests both a seedy impresario and a Vincent Crummles-style veteran actor. Haig adopts the quivering hand and sonic boom of an old tragedian.
At the same time, he suggests that the travelling troupe at his command provide sexual favours on request and that he himself is amorously fixated on his lead boy, played by Matthew Durkan with skittish grace. Good as Radcliffe and McGuire are, it is Haig who comes close to stealing the evening. Even if the action briefly stalls in the final third, Leveaux’s production keeps the momentum going and is full of witty touches: the Hamlet eruptions are neatly done, with Luke Mullins as the prince sporting exactly the same chiselled profile as John Neville in the role at the Old Vic long ago, and the play scene gets amusingly out of hand as the actors become sexually over-enthusiastic.
Anna Fleischle’s design, with its cloud-capped canvases, adds a little touch of Magritte to the night. The cheering fact is that this is a young man’s play that still seems sprightly, invigorating and even moving in its preoccupation with the inevitability of death.
• At the Old Vic, London, until 29 April. Box office: 0844 871 7628.
