Review: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

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.