In 1966, when the only definition of a hard drive was the jaunt to Edinburgh from London with a dodgy minibus full of props and costumes, and the beer at the venues was tuppence a pint and the Edinburgh Fringe was genuinely about the performers and not the corporate sponsors, this astonishing play debuted at the Festival and launched the spectacular career of Tom Stoppard.
For those unfamiliar with it there isnt enough space here to truly describe its complexity. On its simplest level (and the many levels are dazzling) its about two minor characters in Hamlet, and focuses on events that happen off stage in that play. These events lead eventually to their deaths, a demise casually reported in Hamlet almost as an afterthought by a very minor character indeed, the English Ambassador. In the telling of this tale Stoppard manages almost miraculously to deal with the meaning of death, existentialism, acting, the impossibility of certainty, free will and the nature of language itself.
Which brings me to the main problem with this excellently acted production from Polish troupe Theatre La Mort. Though no doubt their English is better than my Polish, their accents often simply prevent them from getting anywhere near these astonishing verbal and linguistic pyrotechnics. The mulit-layered puns and jokes (of which there are many) are lost in mispronunciation and misinflection, so the performance is relatively laugh-free. Worse still, the play is badly cut, not only robbing us of some of its finest passages but actually rendering it nonsensical (R and G seem to know the content of both the letters that they find in Act 3, which is clearly wrong). The unnaturalistic staging doesnt help. If two actors who were previously seen playing Ophelia and Hamlet turn upstage and start delivering lines from Gertrude and Claudius, Im not sure how were supposed to know whats going on. If you dont have a working knowledge of Hamlet, forget it!
That said the leading actors (there was no program available) were incredibly focused and truthful, as was the actor performing The Player, though having to carry on clumsy and rather badly operated puppets to be his fellow thesps again misses the point of their existence in the original. If youve seen the play before youll get something out of this show, but if you havent youll struggle to follow it and may even wonder why Stoppards writing is so marveled at.
But as I sat there realising that at one point I was watching a play in which a rehearsal was being performed for a performance of a play within yet another play I realised that marvel is the only word appropriate. As Ive said, its a play about everything, but it is surely one of the greatest plays ever written about acting. The Player at one points remarks : we were tricked out of the only assumption that makes our existence viable, that somebody was watching. How achingly true those words will be for so many this month.
