Text Work: Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with Geoffrey Wade

Geoffrey Wade from Ep. #5 talks text work on performing The Player from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Geoffrey played this part at Weston Playhouse in Vermont and he even shares some of his script notes from rehearsals.

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Geoffrey’s monologue from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard

THE PLAYER: We’re actors…. We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was. We were caught, high and dry. It was not until the murderer’s long soliloquy that we were able to look around; frozen as we were in profile, our eyes searched you out, first confidently, then hesitantly, then desperately as each patch of turf, each log, each exposed corner in every direction proved uninhabited, and all the while the murderous King addressed the horizon with his dreary interminable guilt…. Out heads began to move, wary as lizards, the corpse of unsullied Rosalinda peeped through his fingers, and the King faltered. Even then, habit and a stubborn trust that our audience spied upon us from behind the nearest bush, forced our bodies to blunder on long after they had emptied of meaning, until like runaway carts they dragged to a halt. No one came forward. No one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself on us; it was obscene. We took off our crowns and swords and cloths of gold and moved silent on the road to Elsinore.