Word: rosencrantzes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Exile, to some degree, is Stoppard's abiding theme. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is exile through ignorance. The two mini-heroes do not understand Hamlet or Elsinore. Junipers is exile from God. No one can clearly divine his purposes or verify his existence. Travesties is exile by intent, a rebellion against social traditions and aesthetic norms. Travesties, a play-within-a-monologue, begins with the age-frazzled Carr (John Wood) reminiscing intimately about the famed Zurich trio in a way that illustrates a perennial travesty: the ravages of time on memory. What follows is part vaudeville, part nonstop...
...never find a playwright whose work I liked." Then he was sent Teeth, a television comedy by an unknown named Tom Stoppard. Wood played a cuckolded dentist who turned his rival's teeth green. Shortly afterward, Wood starred on Broadway in Stoppard's first stage hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Establishment again beckoned; the RSC had asked Wood four times before he agreed to join them. To his relief, "they accepted me completely." The RSC is now home. He can do what he wants: an iconoclastic Brutus in 1972, then the suave, icy Sherlock Holmes last...
...Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. So far, this has proved to be the most durable play to be written in the sixties. Like Shakespeare, it manages to be both an actor's and an audience's play at the same time. R & G really isn't about anything, except maybe words and appearance and reality, and some other things that would sound like the gamut of modern drama cliches if they weren't so funny onstage. It should really be taken in like a dose of laughing gas--without thinking about anything, just relaxing yourself into a body-wide grin. This...
...Hamlet plot has always been an archetypal sources for playwrights. As diverse writers as Goethe (Clavigo), Chekhov (Seagull), W.S. Gilbert (who wrote a play let in which Rosencrantz and Ophelia are secret lovers). Philip LaZebnik '75 (whose Mad About Mintz not only parodies Hamlet but is riddled with themes of death), and Paris Barclay '78 (whose ambitious though now moribund production of Niccolo & The Prince featured Hamlet as a major--character), all have pirated shamelessly from Shakespeare...
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...