Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan lead a stellar cast in a fine production from Halifax’s Neptune Theatre that is a joy to behold and as bracing an engagement for the mind and the funny bone as one is likely to find on stage this season.

First performed in 1966, Tom Stoppard’s absurdist, existentialist play, running at the CAA Theatre until April 6, is as delightfully playful and funny as it ever was, yet newly challenging of our perceptions and our understanding of the uses of theatre.

It’s not as if director Jeremy Webb simply took the play out of mothballs. He enlivens and enriches Rosencrantz by casting experienced and agile actors and giving them plenty of physical activity, music and song. Set designer Andrew Cull’s ingenious use of a pair of movable bleachers makes the transitions in and out of the play at hand and the play performed by the tragedians in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet seamless.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is above all else a comedy, full of snappy dialogue, wordplay and philosophical badinage. It is also makes a lively commentary on the purpose of theatre, life and death and the whole business of existence and

Webb’s casting of the wondrous Scottish actor Billy Boyd (Pippin in the Lord of the Rings trilogy) with his Lord of the Rings cast mate, the prominent television actor Dominic Monaghan, is the making of this production. This Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, lifted out of their minor roles in Hamlet to become Stoppard’s protagonists, are post-modern versions of Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, passing the time with verbal game-playing and like any of Shakespeare’s clowns and commentators, as nimble of foot as they are of tongue:

ROSENCRANTZ: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?

GUILDENSTERN: No, no, no…Death is… not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat.

ROSENCRANTZ: I’ve frequently not been on a boat.

The curtain comes up on the two of them sitting on bleachers playing at coin tossing in an impossible sequence of flips in which every one of 76 tosses has resulted in heads. The theme of chance and fate and is firmly established. Also, the idea that that it’s only a thin veil that separates concrete reality from make-believe. Behind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, through a flimsy black curtain we can see figures on bleachers viewing the coin tossers as if they were giving a performance, which of course they are.

Enter the Player, performed by Stratford veteran Michael Blake, a magisterial, yet often regretful, leader of a pack of tragedians – those who perform The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet – but also the chief roles of Hamlet (a powerful Pasha Ebrahimi), Polonius (Walter Borden), Ophelia (Helen Belay), Gertrude (Raquel Duffy), Claudius (Jonathan Ellul) and others.

It’s all a delightfully complicated, an ironic display of theatricality and the play of language (“Words, words. They’re all we have to go on,” says Guildenstern. “Rhetoric! Game and match!” rejoins Rosenkrantz.)

Entertaining, enlightening and absurdly absorbing.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

By Tom Stoppard

Directed by Jeremy Webb

Movement director Angela Gasparetto

Set designer Andrew Cull

Lighting designer Leigh Ann Vardy

Sound designer/ composer Deanna H. Choi

Produced by the Neptune Theatre

Presented by Mirvish Productions at the CAA Theatre in Toronto until April 6, 2024

Photo by @stoometzphoto: Dominic Monaghan as Rosencrantz, Billy Boyd as Guildenstern