Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
★★★☆☆ Clear
Assembly Roxy: Wed 4 – Sat 7 Mar 2026
Review by Thom Dibdin
New grassroots company Gutter Theatre give a commendably solid showing for their inaugural production: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, playing upstairs at Assembly Roxy to Saturday.
Stoppard’s breakthrough script, which premiered at the 1966 fringe and spent a year on Broadway, is one of those which seems to be famous for being famous. It is an existential, meta-theatrical and, above all, absurdist work. None of which will work unless you get the words right. And Gutter certainly do that.
Shaun Hamilton and Callum Porteous. Pic: Rue Richardson.
Part of the play’s fame is surely down to its quite brilliant meta-theatrical conceit, that it is a sort of inverse of Hamlet. Minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wait in the wings to perform in a play about which they know nothing – beyond what they are told, or is told about them, on stage.
However, beside their own few slight scenes, Stoppard lets them see those things which Shakespeare had happen off stage. Mostly with the tragedians, on the way to the Danish Court at Elsinore where they will perform The Mousetrap, Hamlet’s adaptation of The Murder of Gonzago.
The pair hang about waiting for something to happen. They question their own existence, trying remember further back than being woken up that morning. And they muse on their preposterous streak of heads coming up when they toss a coin.
idiosyncrasies of word play
It needs a determined pair of actors to make this work. Actors who can play it completely straight. There is plenty of comedy in there but, as with most humour that relies on the idiosyncrasies of word play, it works best if the comedy is almost completely ignored by those speaking it.
Shaun Hamilton as Guildenstern and Callum Porteous as Rosencrantz do an immense job in this regard, particularly when they are alone on stage. They deliver the shifting sands of Stoppard’s script as if it were granite: their diction precise, immutable in the face of the porosity of their words.
Shaun Hamilton and Amélie Berry with the tragedians – Arabella Robertson, Rae Webb, Marni Robertson, Andrew More, Ben Black and Morven Hawthorne. Pic: Rue Richardson.
Hamilton is particularly fine in the first act, leading and bossing Porteous’s bewildered Rosencrantz as they toss coins and question their own existence. His is a four-square Guildenstern. His questions are not so much musings on the nature of reality, but an interrogation of it.
Porteous comes into his own in Act 2, when the boundaries of language are being probed. If Rosencrantz is the slower on the uptake of the two, Porteous’ questioning and musings indicate that his Rosencrantz is aware of the depth of his lack of knowledge.
Co-directors Rue Richardson and Jane Morgan have clearly worked hard with the pair to ensure that these tricky parts succeed. Less so when the stage fills up. Mind you, Hamilton’s physicality doesn’t help, particularly when he crowds out Amélie Berry in the key role of the Player, leader of the tragedians.
silent backdrop
The Player needs to impose themself on the stage – after all, they are as much a pimp of the troupe as their director in a theatrical sense. Berry makes the role absolutely sing in later scenes which call for a fight or intimacy director (take a bow Rebecca Mahar). But her early exchanges are imbalanced and unnatural, largely because her strutting Player is physically masked by Hamilton, reducing her impact and thus, the jeopardy of the piece.
The company of tragedians provide a silent backdrop to the Player’s own machinations with the lost duo. Morven Hawthorne often stands apart as a notably mournful Musician, continuing to play her hurdy gurdy, even when it is grasped away from her. Her studied look of disdain echoes Sam Morgan’s atmospheric music and Ella Catherall’s solid sound design.
Shaun Hamilton, Cameron Broadley and Callum Porteous. Pic: Rue Richardson.
Ben Black has most prominence as the put-upon Alfred, a callow youth in the troupe and thus much traded. The troupe’s role is mostly to act as a living, reactive backdrop to the Player, which they discharge clearly.
But their big moment brings a heightened intensity as Black, Marni Robertson’s Player King and Andrew More’s Poisoner act out in mime, what we know as the murder of Hamlet’s father, with Arabella Robertson and Rae Webb as the spies looking on.
Representations of the Danish Court are less successful. It’s just all a bit overwrought and wishy washy, from Cameron Broadley’s Hamlet down. Of course they are but bit players in this tragicomedy, but still you can’t really believe that a credible production of Hamlet is taking place on the other side of the curtain. Ironically, it is only Anna Yarwood’s Polonius who has any particularly credibility.
billowing
To be fair it is not the actors’ fault. The set, with a billowing crimson curtain above, as if caught mid-fall, feels neither like the liminal space it might be, nor even a backstage area. Any deep conceptual design is lost in this lack of belief, which is not helped by the surtitle projection – half on the red, half on black, and comprehensible on neither.
As a production, this provides a strong understanding of the text, without the several more layers needed to dig into the pits and crannies of its more subtle meanings. Gutter have room to expand, but as a starter, this is a strong and credible production of a hugely difficult play.
Running time: Two hours and 35 minutes (including two intervals)
Assembly Roxy, 2 Roxburgh Place, EH8 9SU.
Wed 4 – Sat 7 Mar 2026
Daily: 7.30pm.(Upstairs).
Tickets and details: Book here.
Gutter Theatre on Instagram: @gutter.theatre.
The pre-set view of the Stage for Gutter Theatre’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Pic: Thom Dibdin.
ENDS
