Cassian Bilton & Ieuan PerkinsĬassian Bilton and Ieuan Perkins performed brilliantly what is, for long sections, a two-man play. The set in Armchair Theatre Company’s production (currently running at the Keble O’Reilly) was fittingly sparse and minimalist a blank canvas onto which the actors projected the many theatrical layers which make up Stoppard’s play. With every coin toss, he is reminding us of the performative nature of what we are watching, constantly destroying the fourth wall, and inviting the audience into his world where the laws of theatre supersede those of reality. Here, Stoppard crafts a space in which the laws of probability simply do not apply. The play opens with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, played by Cassian Bilton and Ieuan Perkins, flipping coins over and over again, the coins landing on heads every time. What follows is a complex, funny, and tender exploration not just of theatre and performance itself, but of fundamental questions about life, death, and existence. The play takes two minor characters in Hamlet, and places them centre-stage.
Yet even in 2016, it manages to avoid gimmicks. Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, written in 1966, is Postmodernism at its peak.
Postmodernism is sometimes dismissed as a brief period in recent cultural history where all art became nothing but a meaningless exploration of life’s futility.
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