Brighton Fringe 2025

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Different Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Dark Comedy, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Puppetry, Theatre

Venue: The Friends Meeting House

Festival: Brighton Fringe

Low Down

Review

This is bold, triumphant theatre. A four-hander reduction of a full-length modern classic not previously known in this form. Reduced Shakespeare we’re used to, but a shrunk-Shakespeare-in-wings? With Tom Stoppard’s 1966 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, at the Friends Meeting House till May 11^th, playwright and (here) director Sam Chittenden and Different Theatre have broken new ground.

Chittenden has mounted full-length, smaller-scale modern classics, like Zinnie Harris’s two-hander Meet Me at Dawn, currently revived at the Fringe. This latest venture though is a virtuosic re-thinking; where all other characters bar the two leads are played by just two actors. It’s like feeling the play in lightning strokes: themes laid as bare as structure. In two-hours-fifteen it’s a lean and riotous re-imagining. One where the Player-King’s presence as lightning-rod and ultimate conductor of the living and dead looms over the transparent gentlemen. In limbo, in hell. Repeat.

Naturally, in this form there’s even more of the Waiting for Godot DNA exposed, and Chittenden deftly points this up by deploying two actors who bring a nimbus of Pozzo and Lucky with them: respectively the avuncular, gravelly, Ross Gurney-Randall and Nancy Logan. She’s an actor new to me, whose expressive blankness and Pierrot-like bewilderment arrows into Hamlet’s insouciance.  With a basket, a hammock, very few props save two black screens, it’s a production as portable as the Players themselves: all against the Meeting House wall. With Luke Clarke operating lighting, it’s a darkling plain of renewal too.

Ben Baeza’s Rosencrantz enjoys superb chemistry with Guildenstern’s Morgan Corby – the play’s dominant personality. Corby sets pace and puns as well as limning an existential blank to which these players are thrust when not swelling a scene or three. Some might find their quick-fire elliptical conversation too much. I found in it the terrible familiarity of people who don’t know how often they’re playing dead. Corby strikes off Baeza like a phosphorescent match. Baeza leers bafflement like Stan Laurel. Yet quite soon we realise Rosencrantz’s intelligence is an emotional curve-ball round the chop-logic fireworks of Corby’s Guildenstern.

The luckless duo are helplessly thrust wherever the action dictates. Even when they discover the document importing Hamlet’s death, and then the substitution, they’re able to take no action: they’re thought by an unseen hand, and twitch bewilderment.

Baeza’s all bemusement, beautifully drawn out in a puff-cheeked slow horror of his lot. He’s not sure he is Rosencrantz and nor are we. Corby’s speculative angst has him prodding the confines of the stage and language as if he was performing an operation on himself and reading the anatomy lesson, as Andrew Marvell once put it. Of course it’s screamingly funny; it’s us. With no memory save that they were sent for, the courtiers while away their existence as we first encounter them in Rosencrantz’s “Heads!”, the sole game he wins against Guildenstern’s paralogical musings.

Gurney-Randall’s entrance breaks their tedium-on-speed. As the Player he mirrors an energized version of themselves the duo can’t embrace; alienated into a twilit consciousness that they’ve no more than a goldfish’s reputed memory. With just Logan otherwise as put-upon boy player Alfred and Hamlet, the chemistry’s different, and bleaker than a full cast’s. Though there’s trumpetings and noises-off, the landscape’s stark. Space to think, unthink the players.

All the Player does know is: “We’re actors,  we’re the opposite of people”. Gurney-Randall garnering laughter defines them all; fake deaths are far more real; real ones look so unconvincing. “He did nothing but cry all the time… Never again.” Gurney-Randall’s flickering vulnerability – when the pair appear to have deserted his troupe’s performance and it’s not at first noticed – contrasts with the habited braggadocio he sloughs. Like them (to a degree here, Gurney-Randall seems more knowing) he’s existentially challenged by not existing long enough to know how others are swept up in the Hamlet narrative stream: it prints them all.

Corby’s riposte to the Player is memorable: “It’s just a man failing to reappear…. a disappearance gaining weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.” That’s pure Rilke who was Czech like Stoppard too. Stoppard’s sources slip in under the Shakespearean cloak: Corby draws this out so much you have to find the quote after; his individual speeches hint at the individuality he’s barred from. Though snarling contempt on the audience – “Not a move. They should burn to death in their shoes” – his keynote’s their burning bridges: “Nothing to show for our progress except a memory of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” Corby’s sashay from affront to despair, through bemusement to our amusement, encompasses the open-mouth “lads” Hamlet greets both with. Decorously laddish, ultimately clueless.

The wings of Hamlet’s action here take centre, as Nancy Logan’s Hamlet struts through with élan and a sweep of hair to the Prince incarnate. There’s a pull of other characters like Ross Gurney-Randall’s puppeted Polonius: the irony is he would make a fine Polonius, but here sticks out an arm from behind a screen, extending a puppet as the bufferish father of Ophelia.

Rosencrantz’s hapless summary is self-defining: “We’re overawed, that’s our trouble. When it comes to the point we succumb to their personality.” Here the apparent decisiveness of Gurney-Randall’s Claudius, Logan’s Gertrude, and puppet Ophelia seem vivid, a fantastical paradox where these indeed are the puppets.

Wholly sent for, walking shadows with no volition even when stumbling on their own death warrant, the vividness of both parties confirms these two as more alive because they know they’re dead. And Gurney-Randall’s knowing he’s the opposite of a person somehow insulates his reflective volatility from extinction. He banishes memories of other Players. Logan is exciting and a discovery. Baeza and Corby are a dream pairing. Here, Stoppard’s early masterpiece still startles in such an innovative revival, protesting life to the black-out. Quietly groundbreaking.

The Cotton Theatre Trust, Ophelia doll – Hannah Davies, Trailer – Sam Cartwright, Rehearsal photos – Andrew O-Hara, Puppetry & movement coaching – Gary Sefton

Published May 12, 2025May 12, 2025 by Simon Jenner