Word: guildensterne
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ROSENCRANTZ AND Guildenstern Are Dead is a play about death in more ways than one. Proceeding at the pace of a funeral dirge, its funniest lines are shrouded in sepulchral solemnity, while its supposedly climactic soliloquies are greeted, by a flurry of unsolicited chuckles. When Rosencrantz, after discovering Hamlet's forged letter ordering the pair's execution, sighs woefully, "To tell you the truth, I'm relieved," most of the audience chortles in agreement...
...There is a logic," protests a defiant Guildenstern at one point, but it is one they will never understand, for their only part is to play their part. And their only repose from doubt and uncertainty, the Go dot they ultimately wait for, is death. Death is an exit, and as the Player puts it, an exit is merely an entrance to somewhere else. Life, on the other hand, "is a gamble at terrible odds," and sometimes you lose 92 times in a roll...
...rich interplay. Melvoin has consciously chosen to differentiate very clearly the two main characters in Rosencrantz. Jeff Rubin as Rosencrantz plays a good Yiddish Sancho Panza character who alternates between dawdling silliness and self-indignant outrages over nothing. But our comic response is much more problematic towards Guildenstern (Steve O'Donnell), played as a brooding almost Hamlet-like character who utters Stoppard's lines dripping with metaphysical existentialisms as if they were completely serious and without a hint of self-parody. Stoppard had meant the pair to be anonymous, not-too-bright. Everyman figures, but as played here the frequent...
Though a production bordering on the tedious, the Loeb's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--a mere pilferage from Hamlet of 250 lines--is certainly no crime, and often redeemed by Stoppard's scattered touches of antic lunacy...
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Perhaps no plat has passed so quickly into the standard repertoire as Tom Stoppard's early masterpiece. If you've never seen it, you own yourself a treat, like the first time you read Lewis Carroll or Evelyn Waugh. R & G is an actor's showcase, and if the eponymous reads are any good-you should laugh from the beginning until the surprisingly, tender conclusion. The play is about two characters in search of a language and contains the most brilliant wordplay on the English stage (always rich in wordplay) since Shakespeare or at least Wilde...