Witty words and postmodern pastiche fuse in Sydney Theatre Company’s latest existential offering.

Sydney Theatre, September 2, 2013

The warm sounds of the Beatles’ Two of Us greet my ears and Sydney Theatre Company’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard is done. I turn to the seat next to me and ask, “How was that?” to a fellow concert-patron.

“Intense,” he replies.

First presented in 1966 at Edinburgh Fringe, this monumental and hugely successful play is a highly entertaining mind gym in which Stoppard uses a complex yet fluid dialogue between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet – to effortlessly explore the nature of our elusive and all-too-temporal existence.

What is this play about? Existence itself. It’s a terrifying look at the fact that you and me and everything will one day simply not exist and what do all these words and actions and machinations matter in the meantime?

At least that’s what my university theatre society took it to mean when I played Guildenstern at Australian National University in 2001. I remember asking the director of that production (who has since written a PhD on Stoppard) what he thought...