In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Rosengrange and Guildenstern have a tertiary role. Friends and fellow students of Hamlet, courtiers in the service of the usurper of the throne Claudius and his executive organs, forced to carry to England a royal letter, the content of which they are unaware of. Centuries later, thanks to Stoppard’s subversive writing, they are reborn and live once more on the stage of theater and life, in his existential tragi-comedy Rosengrange and Guildenstern Are Dead.
This curtain of scathing satire of the 20th centuryu h. (1964) opens with the two once-and-now-protagonists Shakespearean triads living a joyless daily life, playing with coins in an indistinct landscape, interrupting each other but also remaining silent for long periods of time. They are in complete confusion and existential anguish. They are unable to understand the world around them, know themselves and make choices beneficial to their lives.
Hesitant and afraid, helpless and indecisive they make no effort to fight the emptiness that torments them. Even when led by Stoppard from the stage of life to the stage of the theater – through the discovery of “the theater within the theater” – they fail to choose their role. They do not remember their past, they are unaware of how their journey began and where they are headed, an ignorance that continues until their imminent death at the end of the play. However, despite its title, the death of the two heroes never comes, as Stoppard keeps Roz and Gil from dying and turns them to life.
The play “Rosengrange and Guildenstern are dead’, although it arises from the Shakespearean tragedy and is in constant conversation with it, it lives and breathes itself. In terms of structure and content it is a reversal and alternative version of “Hamlet”, whose parodic treatment reminds the audience that a great play can come down from its pedestal and speak on an individual and human level through the eyes of everyday people. people, like Roz and Gil, who remind in their existential drama of Beckett’s anti-heroes.
For Stoppard it is difficult to struggle to exist in a chaotic, confused world dominated by randomness, intrigue and blood. But it is morally unacceptable and self-destructive to adopt passivity, which he criticizes with sarcasm and irony, showing that the danger of such an attitude is the existential death that occurs, much earlier than the physical and biological.
A dense work and witty, concerned with our existential anxieties in relation to the social structures that surround us. He moves between realistic optimism (Rosengrange) and philosophical pessimism (Guildenstern) as sides of the same coin, and opposes the determinism that events happen according to some unbroken plan, which invalidates man’s path to self-knowledge and action.
The bittersweet comedy will be staged in a few days from today (21/2) at the theater of Odou Kefallinia – Lefteris Vogiatzis, directed by Stathis Livathinos, who returns to the first work he directed under the signature of Stoppard. In the role of Rosengrange, Vassilis Andreou and in that of Guildenstern, Nikos Kardonis. Co-starring: Aris Troupakis, Maria Savvidou and Giorgos Dambasis.
Its configuration stage area and the costume image of the faces is signed by Eleni Manolopoulou. The director’s close associate Thodoris Ambazis edited the music, with the presence of three musicians on stage and the lighting by Al. Athanasiou.
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