Stage/Theatre

What: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Where: CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge St.
When: Now, until Sat., April 6
Highlight: Andrew Cull’s malleable set, which allows director Jeremy Webb to generate several interesting stage images.
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Fans of The Lord of the Rings will delight in the chance to see two former Hobbits — Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan — in action.

STARS are the best way of convincing commercial theatre audiences to see older plays, the thinking goes. Glance at a list of upcoming Broadway openings and you’ll spot at least two celebrity-led productions of scripts that would usually be perceived as tough sells: Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, starring Jeremy Strong, and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, starring Steve Carell.

Although Mirvish just pulled off a successful run of the latter play with Tom Rooney and bahia watson as the biggest names on the marquee, its CAA Theatre is now playing host to a duo of Hobbits from the Lord of the Rings films: Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan, who are taking on the title roles of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead from 1966. It’s a marketable conceit of casting that’s already led to sold-out houses and two extensions. But while this Neptune Theatre production directed by Jeremy Webb looks mighty nice, the large acting company never quite finds its way into the absurdist rhythm of Stoppard’s three-hour, two-intermission script; pace and cohesion both suffer.

As its title suggests, the popular tragicomedy is a riff on Hamlet. Rosencrantz (Monaghan) and Guildenstern (Boyd), childhood friends of Hamlet (Pasha Ebrahimi) and tertiary characters in Shakespeare, are enlisted by the king (Jonathan Ellul) to spy on their melancholy mate. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead includes snippets of the original iambic pentameter but also depicts what the characters do between their few scenes: nothing. Aware they don’t have main-character energy, much of the duo’s time is spent waiting for something to happen. The only friends they make in Elsinore Castle are the troupe of players enlisted by Hamlet to expose the king’s guilt.

Webb’s production generates several interesting stage images, thanks largely to Andrew Cull’s malleable set. The actors manoeuvre a pair of four-step risers on wheels, adding a vertical dimension to the action and offering abstract versions of locations (the most evocative is a boat). And Leigh Ann Vardy’s tactile lighting conjures Nordic frigidity via blues and greens.

Yet Boyd and Monaghan play strangely broad, especially when it comes to comedy. On an individual level, the work is often clear enough, but overall, I saw little spark between the neurotic Rosencrantz and down-to-earth Guildenstern. (During the more dramatic scenes, Boyd thrives, finding moments of powerful stillness; unfortunately, there aren’t many.)

I’m willing to give the pair the benefit of the doubt — perhaps their performance style is simply highly British and not for this Canadian critic to get. The trouble is that most of the acting ensemble isn’t British either, leaving our titular duo feeling like eccentric outsiders, an issue when a central point of the play is how un-extraordinary these fellows are. Perhaps that’s the issue with any production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead led by stars: how can the show dramatize the plight of being a minor character when the casting itself frames them as major?