Word: rosencrantzes
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...ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD takes the little men of Shakespeare and transforms them into the little Everymen of Beckett. In his American debut, British Playwright Tom Stoppard, 30, offers an agile, witty play that snaps with verbal acrobatics and precisely choreographed dances of the mind, while coming heart-beat close to the pity and terror of mortality. In the title roles, Brian Murray and John Wood are phenomenal, and Derek Goldby's direction has tensile strength...
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...
...Stoppard, 30, rather thinks they are: "Almost everybody thinks of himself as nobody. A cipher, not even a cog. In that sense, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are everybody. I feel that I am like that." A sense of dislocation and exile comes naturally to him. The son of a Czech doctor, Tom Stoppard was born Tom Straussler. The family moved to Singapore when he was two and his father was killed in World War II. Tom went to school and lived in Darjeeling, Calcutta, Delhi and Lahore before coming to England at the age of nine and taking his stepfather...