Background is important...
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If you know your HAMLET and you know your WAITING FOR GODOT, this will be one of the most engaging pieces of theatre you have ever seen or read. It is simply a sensational bit of writing: funny, erudite, challenging, obtuse etc etc. If however you dont know those two other texts, then you're in trouble. As I was, the first time I saw this.
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The most boring play I have read
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My first reaction to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was a yawn. After the power of Empire of the Sun and the sheer brilliance of Hamlet (both of which I had just read for HSC study), I was expecting a work of great profundity, to say the least. In that, and in many other aspects I was disappointed. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had fascinated me as characters, not least for their violent and somewhat undeserved ending. Their fate posed an interesting conflict in Hamlet. It highlighted the difference between Hamlet, who gave the order and displayed no remorse, and Horatio who, while he saw their faults, sympathised with them and did not believe that they deserved their fate. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern unleashed in Hamlet a cold-blooded cruelty that we had not seen up to that point of the play. It added yet another facet onto an already fascinating character.
The original concept of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is quite brilliant -- taking two characters of little importance from a famous play and making them stars of a new but related play telling their story. However, Stoppard's execution is far from satisfactory. Rather than develop the characters he reduces them to a pair of inept simpletons unlike the true Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and more akin to Osric.
This concept could not have been delivered in a less inventive, comical and interesting way. Stoppard has no control over his language, the comedy is scarce and slapstick, and any interest is removed from the characters in the first scene. After reading Hamlet, Stoppard's amateur incompetence was hideously obvious.
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We're actors! We're the opposite of people!
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I am playing the part of The Player in the school production of R+G, and am absolutely loving this play - funny, clever and with an easy introduction to Hamlet. I would recommend this to anyone who is slightly nervous of Shakespeare's tragedies and also just wants a laugh.
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A souffle - all air, no substance
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Often compared with 'Waiting for Godot,'a play which it self-consciously uses as a template, this has none of the profundity or resonance of Beckett. If you've read Beckett, or Hamlet, and want to feel clever that you've spotted the references, then by all means read this. Stoppard, the middlebrow's middlebrow, is a master at making audiences feel smug and think they have had an artistic experience. A brilliant showman, he is an illusionist - his work is all surface and no depths. Yes, it's quite funny, and as long as you treat it as what it is - a jolly night out, not a work of art, you'll enjoy yourself. Just don't let yourself be conned into thinking you've learned anything.
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Rosencrantz And Guildernstern Are Alive
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This play is often compared to "Waiting For Godot", most unfairly in my view, as Stoppard's early masterpiece is, above all else, brilliantly funny. Not in the way of an ironic, navel-gazing comedy about the horror of life, but in the way that makes the audience laugh out loud with genuine laughter. Actually, of course, it IS about the horror of life, and of modern life at that, many of the greatest comedies have a tragic undercurrent, think of Sir Toby's "Chimes at midnight" speech giving texture and shadow to the sunny japes of "Twelfth Night", or of Woody Allen's best films, hovering over the line of comedy and neurotic bathos ("The Purple Rose of Cairo"..."Radio Days".) Here, the early speech about a man who sees a unicorn sets a tone of lonely wistfulness that the blatant failures of the protagonists to match up to the epic events unfolding around them, obvious even to the duo themselves, continues throughout the play. An odd effect of seeing only snippets of "Hamlet" is to make that work seem a real action packed epic. In reality, perhaps, "Hamlet" itself is very similar to "Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead", the heroes of both prove in the end, despite endless talking and dithering, indecisive and inadequate. Stoppard's work is an updating of Shakespeare's, and a comment on the modern world, in that his heroes are not given the redeeming power of poetry. For them, the unicorn is always a deer...with an arrow in its head....
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