Word: rosencrantzes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...YEAR AGO this week I was ready to pack my bags, leave this dreary place, and take up permanent residence in the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, New York City. I had just seen a play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and, once the final curtain came down, I simply could not think of leaving the theatre, never to return...
...might have expected, I never did get back to Rosencrantz during its New York run, and, wish as I might, I knew deep down that I couldn't really camp out in the theatre...
...surface, Stoppard has devised an astoundingly clever theatrical trick. We see only the few scraps of Hamlet that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern see. Since they see so little, Hamlet, Claudius, Ophelia and the rest become merely bit parts in Stoppard's play. We see a mammoth tragedy from the worst possible vantage point, and what little of Shakespeare remains in the play seems ridiculous and funny in this context...
Underneath this droll gimmick, however, is much more. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are at the center of Stoppard's work, and they become its tragic heroes. Like Didi and Gogo, who bide their time with games of the spirit while waiting for the never-to-appear Godot, Stoppard's heroes devise their own games to endure the waiting for their Godot...
...have stopped and logic is dead. A flipped coin comes up heads 85 times in a row. The landscape seems blank and irrelevant to life. Meanwhile, they must watch all of Shakespeare's characters as they walk in and out, moaning and pontificating on subjects that escape them. As Rosencrantz cries in the last act, "Incidents! All we get is incidents! Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action...