Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in the summer of 1966, is the play that put Tom Stoppard on the map. It moved from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End of London and to Broadway, where it won four Tony Awards, including Best Play.

It is a short play (my copy is 126 pages), but a challenging read.

It is a re-envisioning of Hamlet as an absurdist farce. The main characters are, appropriately enough, two of the least important in Shakespeare's play.

I was much amused to learn that its working title at one point was "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear."

Susanna:

I had no idea it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe festival - very cool.

I just saw this on tv, with one of the guys being the main star of the new series Lie To Me, which I have foudn interesting for its first season. This makes me want to go back and read it again.

Al wrote: "Susanna:

I had no idea it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe festival - very cool."

No, neither had I before I read it this time.

I liked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead more than Hamlet, probably because of the dialogue. It was very entertaining.

Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Meet King Lear was actually the original one-act version of the play. I believe it has been published in one of the many Stoppard collections (at least I think I've read it somewhere ..) Stoppard is incredible - his plays work best on stage, I think, because they are so fast and complex (I remember trying to watch Hapgood after flying the red-eye and had to go back again just to make *some* sense of it!) Always inventive and sometimes heartbreaking in his humor (as with Arcadia.

I really do like this play very much. It is one of my favorite modern plays.

Me, too. I first read it my senior year in high school (the teacher was trying to get us intrigued by Hamlet and added this to the syllabus) and it blew my mind. I've been reading, watching, and directing Stoppard ever since. My favorite is probably Arcadia but just about everything he's written is worth it. Incredible!!

What I particularly liked about the dialogue, besides its Waiting for Godot-like style, were some of the subjects. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on their way to England they wonder about what will happen when they get there and Rosencrantz says he doesn't believe in England. Guildenstern then asks him: "Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?" That's almost exactly how I used to think of the world, as a conspiracy. Good to know I'm no more crazy than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They remind me of myself when I was younger, often not questioning - or only very late - what should obviously be questioned, but wondering about other things that are usually not questioned.

Sibyl wrote: "What I particularly liked about the dialogue, except its Waiting for Godot-like style, were some of the subjects. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on their way to England they wonder about wha..."

;P

I saw a film version of this years ago and was so taken with it - especially since I had read HAmlet for 3 separate courses over the previous 2 years and I wondered why or why did my teachers never let me know about this little gem.

And speaking of not questioning things, why did I never question whether I could READ the play. I am so glad to have stumbled across this group and this thread because I am now going to look up other Stoppard plays.

Thanks

So a little late, but I just finished this today. I thought it was terrific - very funny and clever. It makes me want to read a lot more Stoppard. I am also going to go hunt for some versions on film. I do think reading it so soon after "waiting for godot" made it even more enjoyable.

Susanna - thanks again for nominating this one!

No problem - it's one of my modern favorites.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is my second favorite play in existence, right after, appropriately enough, Shakespeare's Hamlet.

One of my life long aspirations is to play Rosencrantz in R&G (I certainly wouldn't be the first woman to do so). I did scenes from it in high school, but never the whole thing.

Jill:

Impressive goal!

I find it amusing that R&G are Dead is one of Susanna's favourites, when she expresses such loathing of Godot, which connects more directly with Stoppard's amazing play than does Hamlet itself. In Hamlet, R and G are indistinguishable, or nearly so. Stoppard turns this into a running joke, but creates truly individual characters, different from Vladimir and Estragon but corresponding (Guidenstern is Vladimir; Rosencrantz is Estragon). The player and his entourage of mutes correspond to Pozzo and Lucky: Lucky dances and recites as an entertainer, the entertainment provided by Pozzo. R and G enact the Gogo/Didi routines: they are boxed in on the stage, the invent games to pass the time, they switch between long speeches and quick-fire dialogue, they are alarmed by the other characters but see them as reinforcements in their struggle with boredom, they cannot remember their past and cannot understand what is going on ... The opening game of coin tossing sets the tone: an endless sequence of heads is alarming, but at the same time it is boring. There are numerous small points of connection between the plays. For example, the trousers falling when the belts are taken off. (In Godot the string belts may become a noose for suicide by hanging. In R&G the belts are to try to contain Hamlet. Neither stratagem works.)

The different threads that find their way into Stoppard's play are numerous. One that I think is very important is the change in the view of Shakespeare's art that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. In the 19th, the emphasis was on character and story. The plays might be have been novels, or even works of real history. A.C. Bradley headed this view. In the 20th this changed: they were seen as pure plays (Granville Barker), or as poems (L.C. Knights). It was emphasised that "offstage" the characters did not exist, and it was idle to speculate how many children Lady Macbeth had, or how long Hamlet spent at Wittenberg. So to see R and G as two people who are in a void when not actually part of the action onstage followed from this critical revolution. That went with a particular interest in R and G themselves. Granville Barker says of them that they are not just nonentities, but a single nonentity split into two. He says of the announcement of their death (which of course gives Stoppard's play its title) that "they were not worth the killing". This is from his "Preface to Hamlet" -- I'm quoting from memory so I may not have got it quite right. One may contrast Oscar Wilde, who saw R and G as wonderful creations, timeless and immortal.

Incidentally in connection with this play I had the good fortune once to say hello to Stoppard. It was done in 2002 at the Theatre Royal, about 15mins from where I live, and I'd gone to collect the tickets. Afterwards I went outside and was looking at a notice board, and realised that the man looking at it beside me was Stoppard. He had come up to Norwich to help with rehearsals. I exchanged a few remarks and managed to get his autograph. What I did with the autograph I'm not sure 'cos I can't find it, but it's in the house somewhere.

I also saw my daughter Rachel in it. She was one of the players in a school production (very ambitious, but really successful).

Also Black Ram, the Company Rachel has worked in, are planning to do it and Hamlet together, using the same characters in the two plays -- another ambitious project! Rachel won't be in that one -- she's at University. Here's a link to pic of Rachel, by the way,

http://www.blackramtheatre.com/Rachel%20...

Gosh, Martin, I'm glad that my taste in plays amuses you.

Wow, Martin thanks for walking us through the links that you see between Godot and R & G and the historicial stuff. Also thanks for sharing the link about your daughter, she has certainly taken on some challenging roles!

Shannon, thanks for the encouragement! (Susanna, I hope you are not offended, I promise I was not trying to make fun of you.)

I must say, in reading R and G are Dead last month, I really felt I was understanding it for the first time.

I thought I'd track down the Oscar Wilde and Granville Barker I quoted. What Wilde said precisely (in de Profundis) was,

"They never die. Horatio, who in order to 'report Hamlet and his cause aright to the unsatisfied,'


'Absents him from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,'

dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo and Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship. He who writes a new DE AMICITIA must find a niche for them, and praise them in Tusculan prose. They are types fixed for all time. To censure them would show 'a lack of appreciation.' They are merely out of their sphere: that is all. In sublimity of soul there is no contagion. High thoughts and high emotions are by their very existence isolated."

-- the last bit means that R and G cannot catch any of Hamlet's 'divine soul', he is in a different sphere.

Granville Barker's notes I can't find on the internet anywhere. Here are a few bits I've copied out,

"Damatically, they seem hardly worth the killing. As parts to be played, unhappy actors cast for them will protest that they are among the very worst in Shakespeare ... they will remain, one fears, superior puppets, for Shakespeare himself has not given them life ... superficial nonentities. They are less even than that; a single nonentity split into two. ... They remain then, two rather lifeless strands in one lively fabric."

Wow its so cool to see this play being talked about - Tom Stoppard is listed in my favorite authors:)
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2236...

He weaves the lives of characters into their world, in this case the court of Denmark, with facility and humor - one of my favorite stage-crafters.

Well, I've just got one imporant thing to say, "Bows at waist."