Tom Stoppard's 1966 tragicomedy is a slippery, challenging piece that delights in linguistic wordplay, existential irony and audience confusion, but Ruth Sullivan's confident, surefooted production does justice to this absurdist masterwork. Stoppard takes the titular characters' brief appearances in Hamlet as the jumping-off point for a dazzling, witty philosophical meditation on the inherent futility of life and our struggles to uncover meaning and purpose in our everyday lives. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are childhood friends of Hamlet, charged by his mother and usurping stepfather/uncle to spy on him and ascertain the causes of his erratic behaviour. In Shakespeare's original, Hamlet runs linguistic circles around the pair and eventually tricks them and sends them to their deaths in his stead, thus foiling Claudius's plot to silence him. Stoppard sympathetically explores the pair's bewilderment, lassitude and angst as Hamlet bamboozles them and they are caught in machinations beyond their control and understanding that makes stooges of them..

The travails of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – wandering forlornly through an unidentifiable landscape with a vaguely defined, impossible mission – thus take on an existential dimension, as their inability to find meaning and certainty, their struggle to impact on the world, and their confusion over their assignment and how best to discharge it reflect the pain and grim humour of our fleeting existence in an impersonal, godless universe. Interwoven are chunks of the original Hamlet as the eponymous pair are charged with their mission by Gertrude and Claudius, encounter the moody and shifty Hamlet, assist him in staging The Mousetrap, and travel with him to England, where they are executed in his place.

Any production of this difficult, thematically heavy play inevitably rests on the two leads, and Andy Murton and Justin Stahley, dapperly dressed in white Edwardian-era suits, admirably shoulder this burden, delivering convincing, strong and multi-layered performances. Although Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are often confused about which one is which, Murton and Stahley skilfully differentiate and delineate their individual characters : Murton performs Guildenstern as a thoughtful man soured and angered by the fog of confusion and uncertainty in which he labours; while Stahley presents Rosencrantz as rather happy-go-lucky, responding with laid-back irony where his friend reacts with baffled rage. The intricate and sometimes astounding barrage of words between the characters is impressively rendered by these two fine actors, who are a pleasure to watch. Martin South also delivers a warm, hearty performance as the lead player, forcefully conveying the wit and conviviality of the character, while also menacingly communicating his mysteriousness and ominousness. The cast of tragedians provide able support, skilfully using dumb-show and pantomime to wordlessly suggest character and heighten atmosphere. At turns, lascivious, greedy, cunning and ridiculous, the supporting cast add a striking element of speechless physicality to a play in love with language. Some of the tragedians' movement, particularly in the production's opening moments, is not altogether convincing, but the hard-working cast perform with unflagging energy and focus.

Sullivan emphasises the knowing theatricality of the piece and the characters often wander offstage, sit with the audience, or, in one amusing scene, use the empty stage as an imaginary tennis court for a dexterous bout of verbal back-and-forth. The thrust staging makes good use of the theatre's space, while the design – a bare, angled platform that appears to disintegrate beneath the proscenium arch – is simple yet strong, complementing the text's playful theatricality. The lighting design also capably accentuates the play's emotional contours and shifts. The doubling-up of the fictional players with the ‘real' characters from Hamlet stretches some of the internal logic of the play, but, as a practical necessity, it add a clever layer of meta-theatrical complexity, suggesting that nothing in this world is quite real. The cuts to the text are not overly intrusive, although the director might have been bolder and gone for a ninety-minute straight run-through; the short second half sometimes struggles to reassert the pace of the first and regain the audience's attention.

Overall, though, this is an admirable, energetic production of a tricky play that delivers two strong lead performances and skilfully navigates the play's difficult shifts in tone and dense layers of irony and double-meaning. This production strikingly demonstrates the Tower's commitment to staging plays that are anything but cosy or safe and forcefully confounds the lead player's cynical insistence that "Audiences know what to expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe."

Photography by David Sprecher