Sydney Reviews

Left – Tim Minchin and Toby Schmitz. Cover – Toby Schmitz and Tim Minchin. Photos – Heidrun Lohr

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. So minor in fact that nobody including themselves can tell which one is which. Their fate will be decided by the toss of a coin, which always lands on heads. Just as inevitably, the play will end with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern losing theirs. They find themselves en route to England, where they face execution by the king. Their last hope is that England will be just a conspiracy of cartographers. A hope shared no doubt by despondent Aussie cricket fans after losing the Ashes yet again.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was a 29 year old Tom Stoppard’s first produced play. A one act version of the play ran for one night in Berlin in 1964. The play premiered in its final form at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1966. This kick-started a distinguished career for Stoppard as a playwright and screenwriter. He wrote many plays for theatre and radio including Travesties (1974) which was also staged by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2009. He wrote an early draft of Terry Gilliam’s, surreal Orwellian masterpiece Brazil (1985) and won the academy award for Best Screenwriter for the film, Shakespeare in Love (1998). Stoppard was knighted in 1997. Stoppard would also write and direct a film adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1990.

The script is packed with scintillating word play and top notch one liners. Our dynamic duo are appointed to engage Hamlet in conversation and determine the nature of his madness so indeed, words are all they have to go on.

In some ways you get the sense that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the audience for a production of Hamlet themselves. This is greatly added by the costume design which sees the cast of Hamlet, in fun and flamboyant Elizabethan theatrical dress while the two leads are dressed conservatively in comparison, looking like Elizabethan lone rangers, with swords hanging down beside their tight leather pants.

Toby Schmitz and Tim Minchin are outstanding. Minchin is a revelation. Most of us are familiar with the image of Tim sitting in front of a piano with his lion’s mane of orange hair. He stays quite still and reserved for most of the performance, breaking into wild pacing terror after realising the exact nature of death, which for him is spending eternity lying in a box. Schmitz, who will be playing the lead role in Hamlet at Belvoir in October, portrays a Guildenstern who is desperate to take control of his own circumstances but eventually despairs at his own predetermined fate. Schmitz and Minchin seem completely comfortable with their roles and each other, improvising when they have trouble putting their belts back on or getting out of the wooden kegs on board the boat that is taking them to England. It's interesting that in a play packed with one liners and wordplay the uncomfortable silences often get the biggest laughs.

The support cast have great fun. Particularly Tim Walter as Hamlet, John Gaden as Polonius and Ewen Leslie who plays the lead player in the acting troupe.

The applause for the actor’s bows was some of the loudest I’ve heard. It was thoroughly deserved too. This is Stoppard’s genius script brought to the stage in a production which is rollicking good fun.  


Sydney Theatre Company presents
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
by Tom Stoppard

Director Simon Phillips

Venue: Sydney Theatre, 22 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay
Dates: 6 August – 14 September 2013 (Opening Night 10 August)
Tickets: $50 – $105 (fees apply)
Bookings: 02 9250 1777 | sydneytheatre.com.au