Between the Acts

As I mentioned previously, I just wrapped up a production of Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The play tells the story of William Shakespeare's classic tragedy Hamlet from the point of view of two minor characters, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, who are Hamlet's close friends. Throughout the show, the two attempt to understand why they have been summoned to Elsinore, and ask questions about life, death, and Fate.

Tim Roth and Gary Oldman as the title characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990)

And, this week, in one of my English classes, we have begun discussing Virginia Woolf's final novel, Between the Acts (hence the title of the post). And I cannot help but feel like there is a certain poetry to these two events coming so close to each other. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is an actor-driven play - the two leads are on stage for the entirety of the show (with the exception of intermission - otherwise, I think my costar and I would have pulled a Hamlet and gone insane!), and never stop talking. But each audience member gets something different out of the show. Because the show is heavily existentialist (the characters always lose track of how they came in, and so they cannot go off, for example), people who connect to that philosophical school are bound to pull different ideas from it than people who are unfamiliar with the thoughts of Sartre and Camus. Audience members who are unfamiliar with Hamlet likewise discover different things in the text. For me, having lived in Rosencrantz's shoes for almost three months, I think that what I found in the play was the idea that even the most innocent-seeming men and women can have the deepest thoughts. It is Rosencrantz who delivers one of the most powerful speeches (in my opinion) - on the nature of death. But he cannot hold onto the idea - he laughs it off, and then becomes infuriated by the events surrounding him.

This idea of audience interaction is one of the major themes that we are discussing as a class with Between the Acts. One of the actors who worked with me on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is in the class with me, and we are both excited to see where Woolf takes this idea in the novel. I greatly believe in the idea that each audience member takes their own interpretation as they leave (its the same thing that happens with books or movies), and I can't wait to see what happens for the characters in Between the Acts!