Kill Me Now

About a month and a half ago, I attended a drama festival along with the rest of the cast of Scapin. While there we saw two productions, one of which I will be commenting on today. Seeing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was probably the most horrific and painful experience of my life. I could not believe that they had been selected by a panel of judges as the best in their area. Perhaps this is just me, a high school student without any knowledge of the back story, speaking in anger, but I had always thought that a sincerely good play should be able to stand up on its own. I did not even realize that the plot had anything to do with Shakespeare's Hamlet as the 15 Minute Hamlet sequence performed before RAGAD seemed so out of place and unconnected with the rest of the performance. The whole idea of a plot revolving around the coin flipping was incredibly dull and unstimulating.

Perhaps it wasn't so much the script that was bad as it was the acting. The two girls playing the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had no charisma while on stage. Their boredom with their own coin flipping game made it difficult for the audience to even pretend to be excited. The situation was only compounded by the fact that I had never read Hamlet before. There was no sense of connection or coherence for me. I felt as though all the actors on stage were regurgitating words upon words with no meaning. It was one of those plays where I felt you had to concentrate hard every second otherwise you would miss out on what someone said.

The lack of projection was also another problem the play encountered. The theatre at Fontana High School is exceptionally large, and without the help of microphones, the cast was basically already at a disadvantage. The actors, however, should have been cognizant of this throughout their performance, and yet they continued to under project. By not enunciating or projection, much of the quick dialogue was lost on me and the other students. The lack of interest in the performance at one point became so great that the audience would begin to cheer whenever it seemed as though one of the characters onstage were about to die. There were many of these close calls, and each time we were disappointed that the performance was still not done.

Although this experience was a traumatic one, it was not a complete waste of time. This particular production of RAGAD taught me what not to do when approaching this kind of pastiche script, especially one having to do with Shakespeare's works.