I suspect that this will be as definitive production of this play as I will ever see. Everyone involved was simply perfect in their parts. Even the minor characters--so Hamlet and the rest--were tremendous; I would happily have watched that staging of Hamlet afterwards, or before. David Haig as the Player King nearly, nearly walked away with the whole piece--he does, after all, get the bulk of the good lines, and doesn't need to bear the weight of the joke essentially being on him. But the central R&G were near-definitive, including (yes) Daniel Radcliffe, sinking perfectly into the slighter of the two parts.
What a sad, sad script this is, all the more so for the near-perfect jokes (and some quite terrible ones) contained within. The last time I read this I must have been in undergrad, and the nods to Beckett--the barrels and whatnot--were lost on me; I'm sure I thought the "gods aspiring to maidenheads" line, here happily glossed over, was hilarious. I think it has aged with me; now at thirty-six, I found its treatment of death properly terrifying, probably because the fissiparous wit made being alive seem comparatively more enjoyable. (This doesn't always happen to me with live Beckett.)
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