Word: stoppard
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...London and Broadway hit that catapulted an obscure Tom Stoppard to fame and chic respectability, Rosencrantz focuses on the bewildering world of the two minor characters in Hamlet and their hellish and condemned existence in a play they do not understand. A madcap Danish prince reels drunkenly in and out, a tossed coin falls on "heads" 92 times in a roll, distracted characters enter and exit without explanation...
...main characters in Rosencrantz. Jeff Rubin as Rosencrantz plays a good Yiddish Sancho Panza character who alternates between dawdling silliness and self-indignant outrages over nothing. But our comic response is much more problematic towards Guildenstern (Steve O'Donnell), played as a brooding almost Hamlet-like character who utters Stoppard's lines dripping with metaphysical existentialisms as if they were completely serious and without a hint of self-parody. Stoppard had meant the pair to be anonymous, not-too-bright. Everyman figures, but as played here the frequent confusion between the pair's names becomes a rather superficial joke routine...
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Perhaps no plat has passed so quickly into the standard repertoire as Tom Stoppard's early masterpiece. If you've never seen it, you own yourself a treat, like the first time you read Lewis Carroll or Evelyn Waugh. R & G is an actor's showcase, and if the eponymous reads are any good-you should laugh from the beginning until the surprisingly, tender conclusion. The play is about two characters in search of a language and contains the most brilliant wordplay on the English stage (always rich in wordplay) since Shakespeare or at least Wilde...
Playwright Paul Foster is not a newcomer to the stage. His Tom Paine (1968) enjoyed substantial popularity off-Broadway, particularly with younger audiences, thanks in part to Tom O'Horgan's flamboyant staging. In Marcus Brutus, Foster has followed Tom Stoppard's lead in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Just as R. & G. used Hamlet for its substructure, Marcus Brutus uses Julius Caesar...
...audiences around here it's probably less because its characters are like people we know than because so many plays recently have used the same sort of situation and devices (plays like Moonchildren and The Wager). What these plays have in common is the use of clever, Tom Stoppard-like dialogue as a facade, covering emotions that are revealed in a dramatic crisis. Paul Ableman is no Tom Stoppard, but his brand of collegiate wit keeps the surface of his play funny and entertaining...