Word: stoppard
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...more mature about these things, so when this play, the work of a young Englishman named Tom Stoppard, showed up at the Shubert as part of a post-Broadway tour, I went to the theatre cool and detached, as if I were visiting the scene of a long forgotten love affair. But theatrical love affairs, like that other kind, can be suddenly rekindled. Sure enough, I left the Shubert ready to go back again the next night...
THIS PLAY --and, to be honest about it, I hardly can begin to describe it--tells the story of two of Shakespeare's most anonymous characters as they walk in and around the doings at Elsinre in Hamlet. The title characters of Stoppard's play, in case you have forgotten them, are two friends of Hamlet's from university days who are summoned by Claudius to help ascertain the nature of Hamlet's madness...
...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...