Word: stopparded
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Dates: during 1967-1967
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Death is the theme of the play, and it could be said of Stoppard as Eliot said of another dramatist...
They kill the time with intellectual vaudeville-puns, word games, syllogistic oneupmanship. As they do so, it becomes apparent that Stoppard owes fully as much to Samuel Beckett as he does to Shakespeare. R. and G. are transparent replicas of the two tramps who wait for Godot. But where Beckett's dialogue almost expires in pauses of resignation, Stoppard's lines pant with inner panic. Delivered with comic ardor at machine-gun speed, R. and G.'s interchanges combine mental verve with spiritual desolation. It is as if the quiz kids of Wittenberg U. found themselves desperate...
...feel that their existence is a cheat: "To be told so little to such an end-and still-finally-to be denied an explanation." Here and elsewhere, Stoppard comes perilously close to singing the self-pity blues, or life-is-a-dirty-trick. All men and women submit to fate, but they are not all Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns...
...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...
...Stoppard hugely enjoys honing language to the precision point. Nonetheless, a play that rides on words as heavily as does R. and G. ought to have rid itself of some. Even the tensile strength of Derek Goldby's direction cannot keep segments of the drama from dialogyness. There is nothing logy about Brian Murray and John Wood in the taxing title roles. Every shifting breeze of the play's moods crosses their faces: they can summon up anxiety, false courage, utter bafflement, and honest fear with a flick of the lip, or a twist of the torso. They...