After Terence Rattigan's deeply moving RAF play, Flare Path, the second offering in Trevor Nunn's Haymarket season is Tom Stoppard's still stunningly audacious 1965 debut - a work that electrifies the mind even if the heart remains dormant.
Its two eponymous heroes are a couple of minor characters in Hamlet who, as they wait in the wings for their big scene, ruminate on probability theory, the structure of narrative, death and, like Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, hope that something will arrive that gives meaning to their lives.
The characters are the gofers in Hamlet who come to a sticky end when they are sent to accompany the Prince to England. And although exploring the off-stage life of characters sounds like the kind of idea that writers ditch when they have sobered up, in Stoppard's hands it results in a dizzying exploration of mortality and drama.
For much of the evening there is a sense of Nunn - who as a young RSC director discovered Stoppard's script in a pile of works written by aspiring playwrights - searching for the play's elusive poignancy, or attempting to anchor the freewheeling cleverness of it all to a particular moment in dramatic history. But nothing can shake the impression that the characters exist mainly to reveal the precocious talent of a young author - which is as good a reason as any.
With this revival, first seen in Chichester, there were a few members of the audience who decided not to return to their seats after the interval, presumably because no matter how clever the word-play, they did not care enough about the fate of those who spoke it. They have a point. But they also missed a tense second half as it dawns on Samuel Barnett's neurotic Rosencrantz and Jamie Parker's clever Guildenstern that they are locked into a story that ends badly for them, and in which it dawns on us that so are we.
It is terrific fun, too, seeing Hamlet treated with such irreverence. And the lines that separate real life and drama are blurred to such an extent that you leave the theatre awestruck at the audacity with which Stoppard combines the two.
