I didn’t see the Lord of the Rings movies so I didn’t know who Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd were apart from the stars in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, now enjoying a soldout run at Neptune Theatre.

But now, having seen this epic, existential play, I know what they are: fantastic British stage and film actors, as well as longtime friends, who bring an absurdist duo that would make Samuel Beckett proud to full comic life with amazing memory work, technical skill, lovely inflection, nimble physicality and pathos. The whole audience was carried along with them to the point of making a loud “aw” at a sweet moment late in the second act.

Director Jeremy Webb’s production of Tom Stoppard’s 1966 classic is pitch-perfect. This wordy, dark comedy of the absurd about mortality, fate and theatre itself needs a careful balance of realism and the overly theatrical.

Webb anchors Monaghan and Boyd in realism even as their characters don’t know where they are, who they are, or where they are going – a modern and timeless human dilemma. They only know they are destined to die.

Stoppard, working very clearly in the genres of absurdist theatre and meta-theatre, turns Hamlet inside out taking two minor characters who, in Hamlet, are childhood friends of the prince and become spies, and making them the centrepiece of his three-act drama.

The anti-heroes encounter a troupe of melodramatic tragedians led by The Player, portrayed in a marvellous, robust and compelling way by Stratford Festival actor Michael Blake. (The cast of this show is a lovely, though occasionally uneven, one of Canadian actors and local actors living here or coming back home including Pasha Ebrahimi as the princely, disturbed, gravel-voiced Hamlet, Walter Borden as Polonius (and we all know what a voice he has!), Raquel Duffy back in town as Gertrude, Erin Tancook in her Neptune debut, Jacob Sampson as Laertes and Drew Douris-O’Hara in the comical role of the tragedian Alfred.

The lighting by Leigh Ann Vardy is just gorgeous. Often the play is in a kind of dark Elizabethan gloom so when the lights flash up, or even when they are quiet glowing lanterns on a boat, it’s like a trumpet blaring a beautiful song.

The design team for this play is a dream with Kaelen MacDonald’s earthy, post-apocalyptic costumes (which could also belong to an ancient caravan of players); Deanna H. Choi’s sound design and Andrew Cull’s imaginative set with wooden bleachers. It’s as if the two main characters were left behind in a locked school gym long after the tournament is over.

These wooden pieces are whipped around to become a stage or that boat rocking on the English Channel. Hanging from above is a ragged, gloomy, sail-like curtain that looks like it’s been through a hurricane.

Webb’s new twist on the ending works well; shifting from the final beautiful, dense bloom of blackness back to the beginning to suggest that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on an endless time loop and destined to die over and over again.

Webb did coincidentally talk to Stoppard in a surprise phone call from the revered playwright. “He called to answer a question I had. I did NOT expect him to call me himself,” Webb said in an email. “I was blown away. He sent the cast and team his best wishes and even thanked me for doing his play. I was speechless (rare) and thanked him for writing it.”

The play, entirely produced and crafted by Neptune, goes to the Mirvish’s CAA Theatre March 5 to 31; this run already has limited availability and has been extended. Once Webb could confirm he’d signed up Monaghan and Boyd after an encounter at Hal-Con, the Mirvish Theatre wanted the play. This is a Nova Scotia import to Toronto to take pride in.

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Tags: hamlet, review, shakespeare, theatre, writing