Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Plebs is a two-hander from Raymondo Productions that riffs on the idea of having two actors who decide to perform Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, despite having little knowledge of the plot. That’s a brave idea. Any play that again puts those two hapless courtiers from Hamlet centre-stage is bound to invite comparison with Stoppard’s 1966 absurdist masterpiece. Brave, or perhaps foolish, because Stoppard’s play has seldom been matched for its inventiveness and wit.  Do they get away with it? 

Two actors, Tom Hogan and Gherto Tanzarella, bound on to the stage.  Friends who met at Bath Spa University, they are young, full of energy, and eager to entertain.  Their sense of fun and apparent spontaneity is initially very engaging, for they are very likeable performers.  They know their Stoppard, too, for Hogan has been involved in a production of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, and Tanzarella has written a dissertation on absurdist theatre. But their material is woefully thin.  Too many jokes hinge on the interchangeability of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and there are too many sections that are little more than chunks of Shakespeare delivered with silly voices. A repeated shtick is the idea that they are trying out a string of ideas that they then reject.  Lines such as ‘What are we doing?’ and ‘That’s rubbish!’ sadly prove to be hostages to fortune.

There is an amusing sequence where they deliver some lines from Shakespeare as if they were in a TV drama about Los Angeles cops, but I found that such genuinely funny moments were few and far between.  Tom Hogan and Gherto Tanzarella are good company in themselves, but Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Plebs suffers from a shortage of dramatically effective ideas.   ★★☆☆☆   Mike Whitton   4^th July 2019

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