Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PROVINCETOWN, MASS. Playhouse. They were extras around Hamlet's Elsinore. When Tom Stoppard's spotlight shines on them in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, they are found to be heroes of flashing wit but blinking comprehension, unsure whether they are involved in a comedy or a tragedy...
...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...
...simply to be abandoned, set loose to find their own way." They accept their deaths calmly, hopefully. ("Well, we'll know better next time.") In this hint of optimism, there is perhaps hope for surviving in a world in which "we drift through time, clutching at straws." And, when Stoppard shows us part of Hamlet's final scene, the English Ambassador's pronouncement "that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" elicits the audience realization that death may be the only event it can count on in an insane universe...
...While Stoppard's play could probably not have been written before Beckett come along, it is every bit a peer for Waiting for Godot. The comic and tragic elements, brilliant in themselves, are ingeniously balanced and woven into the Hamlet framework. The dialogue flows like nothing I've heard in a long time, and Stoppard uses the English language with more precision than any other playwright around...