Cinema
On the road
to Elsinore
Gabriele Annan
Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstem are Dead is all words, word- play and semantics — impossible to imag- ine on screen. Well, Stoppard himself has written the screenplay and directed what turns out to be an enchanting film, clever, funny, tense, touching and — least pre- dictable of all, perhaps — terrific to look at. It is rather hard on Zeffirelli's Hamlet to have this other Hamlet film breathing down his neck. Both are conventionally set in Shakespeare's time and right from the very first frame, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern riding towards Elsinore up a silvery cliff face, Stoppard's is more arrest- ing, more imaginative, more unexpected and more beautiful visually.
And aurally too. The sound is exception- al: not just the best ever birdsong and creaking floorboards, but particularly clever with speech: speech half-heard through closed doors, coming nearer, bursting on to the screen, then receding, moving off-screen, doors closing on it, fad- ing right out. Of course, this is especially effective when the half-heard speech is an exchange that everyone knows, or when you find yourself lip-reading Hamlet as he silently begins to wonder whether it is bet- ter to be or not to be (the screenplay incor- porates 250 lines of Shakespeare's text). Stoppard and his sound crew produce a constant, threatening sense of things going on off-screen: this is Hamlet inside out, not the play within the play but the play behind the play. Shakespeare's exits are its entrances, and Rosencrantz and Guilden- stern its heroes.
They start off bewildered: why are they on the road to Elsinore? What made them set out? Then Guildenstern remembers: 'We were sent for.' This is the first quota- tion from Shakespeare. They repeat it once or twice, and the line takes on a doomy res- onance. Tim Roth plays clever, resourceful, pessimistic Guildenstern, much given to philosophising and bouncing words around. He is often impatient with Rosencrantz, who is a bit slow on the uptake, accident- prone but sunny and optimistic, even at the end with the hangman's rope already round his neck. Gary Oldman plays him with beguiling sweetness; it melts the heart just to hear him apologise and he does it all the time because he is always falling about and breaking things.
The King sends for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet because they are his schoolfriends. This is odd: they have obviously been educated at a compre- hensive school, whereas Hamlet (lain Glenn) must have been at least at Charter- house and looks like Rupert Brooke. The deliberate mismatch opens up possibilities for interpretation: is Hamlet archaic because that is how princes are? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern feel so bewildered at court because they don't fit in socially? These are just extra, superficial teases in an experience that is a profound tease from start to finish.
The biggest teases of all are the mysteri- ous Players. They are led by Richard Drey- fuss, who manages to be flamboyant, threatening, ingratiating and authoritative by turns — a magnetic performance. The play within the play is mimed in beautiful, slit-eyed masks, reminiscent, of course, of Noh and Kabuki, and much more sinister and pathetic than the usual thespian rant- ing. Beyond the mime there is another dimension: a puppet play which horribly foreshadows Shakespeare's multi-lethal ending.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstem was shot in Yugoslavia. The mimes and their coach (Ivica Boban) as well as the puppets and their master (Zlatko Bourek) are all Yugoslay. Altogether, Yugoslavia has come up trumps, with Grimm's Fairy Tale forests for the outdoor scenes and a romantic Renaissance castle with flaking frescoed halls and stairways for the interiors. What with one thing and another, this is a lovely film — intriguing, funny and sad. But not tragic: it sticks firmly to being a hugely enjoyable jeu d'esprit.
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