bloodygranuaile

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was the latest selection for my Classics book club; I only got around to actually reading the text yesterday, but nearly the first thing I did when I saw the book listed was run to Netflix and watch the 1990 movie production with Tim Roth and Gary Oldman. I’d seen it once before, many years ago, and I think it was better this time around, possibly because I was somewhat prepared for how utterly weird it was and possibly just because I am older and better able to understand it.

The play, once I got around to reading it, was, as one would expect, pretty much the same as the movie, except that my favorite line was missing. Favorite line in question is the bit where Gary Oldman as Rosencrantz mentions Hamlet’s claim that he “knows a hawk from a handbag” and Tim-Roth-as-Guildenstern looks annoyed and goes “a HANDSAW” and Gary Oldmancrantz is like “…a handsaw.”

If you’re not familiar with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, it’s an absurdist/existentialist tragicomedy sort of thing that follows two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet’s boyhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. SPOILER: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die! Some bits of the text are lifted straight from Hamlet as the two men appear in their proper scenes; when they are not in their on-scene parts from Hamlet, they speak in a more modern style—in prose rather than iambic pentameter—and argue themselves in circles about things like what is death and what are they doing here anyway, and why have they spun a coin and had it come down heads eighty or ninety times in a row. One of the ongoing conceits in the play is the two men seem to have very little identity, as they are unable to remember any of their lives before they are summoned to Elsinore, and also they (and everyone else) keep mixing up which of them is Rosencrantz and which of them is Guildenstern. They do have somewhat distinct personalities, though, with Guildenstern being shrewd, philosophical, and somewhat sharp-tempered, and Rosencrantz being usually more mild and cheerful but also frequently pretty dumb. Like so:

GUIL: And syllogism: One, he has never known anything like it. Two: he has never known anything  to write home about. Three, it's nothing to write home about... Home... What's the first thing you remember?
ROS: Oh, let's see... The first thing that comes into my head, you mean?
GUIL: No - the first thing you remember.
ROS: Ah. (Pause.) No, it's no good, it's gone. It was a long time ago.
GUIL (patient but edged): You don't get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you've forgotten?
ROS: Oh. I see. (Pause.) I've forgotten the question.

The whole play is basically like that, except for the bit where they’re on a boat, which is even more like that.

One of the big themes in this play is plays, as not only is it a play about a play, it is also a play that features bits of the other play, including the famous play-within-a-play, and then it’s turtles plays all the way down. The first other people that the two protagonists meet on their way to Elsinore are the troupe of Players that later put on the play-within-a-play, who talk a lot of self-aggrandizing but funny criticism about the state of theater and what it is that they do. The lead Player is egregiously annoying, but it seems fitting, particularly when contrasted against the earnest but constantly bewildered Guil and Ros. The lead Player’s belligerent love of theatrical death sets up a lot of discussion about the reality of death and death in art, although I do think that the best death-related musing in the play is the one between R and G about death possibly or not-possibly being a boat.

There are also many, many, many puns, and allusions to all sorts of famous-things-that-can-be-alluded-to, and double entendres, and other sorts of wordplay. I think this play bears repeated readings (or viewings), if only to untangle all of the jokes.