(a tale shaped by a butterfly somewhere - sometime)
We go through life like people in early societies needing the reassurance
of the repetition of natural cycles to confirm our status. We crave predictable
and repeatable pattern. Eclipse and flood disrupt the periodicy of life,
sending us reeling down uncertain paths till a new balance is achieved.
We fear Pinter's knock in the middle of the night, yet we answer its beckon.
R&G are us. They answer the call of the man standing in stirrups and the pattern of their existence is disrupted - their course altered.Anew pattern emerges, similar but unfamiliar, uncertain. The new pattern becomes a series of new patterns, similar but uncertain. Changes of direction, reversals, shifts of time/place - leaps from existence in a natural state to participation in a hyper-state of linearity and perfect periodicy. In Hamlet , they die but are forever ressurected in blissful ignorance to repeat their journey. In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead they must continue in uncertainty down each new path amidst patterns that are familiar and confusing at once.
Like self-similar patterns in fractal geometry, the scenography for this production will utilize spatial forms that recur in different scales as R&G shift from the prosaic world of tossing coins and probability to the poetic world of linear predictability we know as Hamlet. A park bench is a home base, a safe zone for them as they encounter reversals and bewildering repetitions that offer uncertainty instead of solace. Patterns of nature (fractals, micros and macros, fragments?) glow on a large textured cloth in their/our world. Classical geometry and mirror reflections shape the formal world of Hamlet.. R&G die in Hamlet to be reborn each time his world is created. R&G are forced in Stoppard's play, as we are in life, to live on in patterns that change. "Your smallest action sets off another somewhere else, and is set off by it". Their park bench disappears and they must travel a new path and learn its pattern until the butterfly flaps its wings again somewhere.
(Produced at the Studio Theatre in 1995) Design by Randy Ward