Word: rosencrantzes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some plays open windows; others open worlds. The excitement attending Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is that it is one of those rare plays able to open worlds of art, life and death. The sun of this drama is coruscating wit and laughter; its shade is melancholy death. Broadway may not see a more auspicious playwriting debut this season...
Stoppard has chosen to use Hamlet as a metaphor for existence. Through his fable he marches good Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern blindfolded. They know little of their roles and less of themselves. In fear and trembling, they jolly their way to their doom. Every man does the same, Stoppard implies, for no man can divine the purpose of existence except to know that life is uncertain and death is sure...
...echo later when the Player King says, "Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it." Just as the play is a kind of jangled echo chamber of Hamlet, so each word, event, mood and character develops an echo. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are echoes of each other, since they perpetually confuse each other's names. They have been summoned to Elsinore by Claudius, or by fate, and they seem to be dawdling apprehensively...
...Cook's Garden, an Ira Levin melodrama about medical ethics, with Burl Ives, Screen Actor Keir Dullea (David and Lisa) and George C. Scott as director. From Britain, David Merrick is bringing a sure conversation piece: Playwright Tom Stoppard's existentialist upending of Hamlet, titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Another West End import is the adaptation of Muriel Spark's novel about a slightly bonkers Edinburgh schoolmarm, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The title role, perfected by Vanessa Redgrave, now goes to Australian-born Zoe Caldwell. Arriving more belatedly from Britain is Harold Pinter...
...deed. Hamlet is also the first supremely self-conscious hero to tread the stage. This is where Richard Pasco's failure is most manifest. He portrays a computer's Hamlet, mechanically feeding himself punch cards marked Father's Ghost, Ophelia, Laertes, Horatio, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and responding mechanically to them. His co-players do not perceptibly help by acting like crumpled punch cards...