Chichester Festival Theatre
Trevor Nunn's fine production of Tom Stoppard's 1966 play begins with a striking image: the two heroes seen against the stark background of a leafless tree. The Beckettian echoes are deliberate since, for all its nods to Eliot, Kafka and Wilde, the play often seems like a speculation on what would happen if Vladimir and Estragon turned up in Elsinore.
Like Beckett, Stoppard shows two figures struggling to find identity and purpose in a world that makes little sense. But, more than any previous version, Nunn's production underscores the fact the play is a prolonged meditation on death. Rosencrantz, in particular, is haunted by the subject: he tries to guess what a state of non-being is like and, in the play's most resonant line, suggests "we must be born with an intuition of mortality".
The Player, whom the heroes encounter at Elsinore, also reminds them that, while finding their feet, they are in danger of losing their heads. Yet, ironically, they fail to recognise themselves when their mimic deaths are presented in dumb-show. Stoppard is always praised for his intellectual ingenuity: far more important is how, even in his late 20s, he was obsessed with human transience.
Nunn's production not only gets to the play's emotional core, but also artfully distinguishes between the two leads. Samuel Barnett's outstanding Rosencrantz strikes an often hilarious note of panic and fluster in the face of uncertainty, while Jamie Parker's Guildenstern strives to maintain an air of Socratic stoicism. Chris Andrew Mellon, stepping in at short notice for Tim Curry, also does an excellent job as the Player, who is a mixture of seedy pimp and robust rhetorician. Yet what finally moves one is the way the two heroes, as the darkness closes in, cling to each other for comfort. Exactly as in Beckett.