Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a play that makes me feel so overwhelmingly Something because like. They’re characters that in Hamlet are so minor and so inseparable that everyone, including themselves, keeps getting their names mixed up because it doesn’t matter which is which. They have no memories because they’re so minor that they don’t have a backstory. They’re bounced from scene to scene, knowing the lines for their conversations with no clue how they know, vaguely aware of their own status as minor in the story of Hamlet, and yet they are the main characters of their small, confusing, ridiculous, comedically tragic story. They are destined not just to die, but to die and live over and over in the endless cycle of their tiny, off-screen tragedy. It drives me actually insane
And then there’s the fact that Guildenstern spends the entire play asserting that real death isn’t any amount of drama or fake blood or falling down, it’s just a person being there until they’re not, and it cannot be acted— and that’s how their deaths are the realest ones in Hamlet in some ways, because they’re there until they’re not. Because the last thing Rosencrantz does is walk offstage and the last thing Guildenstern does is disappear, because they don’t act death, and it’s so— [rips my hair out]
Also this part
LIKE HOW DO YOU LOOK AT THIS AND NOT FEEL SOME KIND OF FUCKING WAY!!!! MARKED FOR DEATH! IT IS WRITTEN!
THE STORY OF HAMLET IS THE BOAT! THEIR MOVEMENT CONTAINED IN A LARGER ONE THAT CARRIES THEM!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I maintain that the best hamlet is the hamlet that sits on the top deck of the boat drinking cocktails.
[ID: Several excerpts from the play.
Image 1: (Pause) ROS: Shouldn’t we be doing something - constructive? GUIL: What did you have in mind?… A short, blunt human pyramind..?
Image 2: PLAYER: It never varies - we aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death dies. GUIL: Marked? PLAYER: Between “just desserts” and “tragic irony” we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get. (He switches on a smile.) GUIL: Who decides?
Image 3: PLAYER (switching off his smile): Decides? It is written.
Image 4: (One by one the players emerge, impossibly, from the barrel, and form a casually menacing circle round ROS and GUIL who are still appalled and mesmerised.) GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…
Image 5: GUIL: Our names shouted in a certain dawn… a message… a summons… there must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it. (He looks round and sees he is alone.) Rosen-? Guil-? (He gathers himself.) Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you- (And disappears.)
Autumnal-nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day… Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it… Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses… deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth-reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
There’s a logic at work - it’s all done for you, don’t worry. Enjoy it. Relax. To be taken in hand and led, like being a child again, even without the innocence, a child - It’s like being given a prize, an extra slice of childhood when you least expect it, as a prize for being good, or a compensation for never having had one.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
On 26th August 2013 BBC Radio 2 hosted a day of programmes celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’sThe Dark Side Of The Moon. One of those programmes was the much anticipated play Darkside written by Tom Stoppard. He’d been originally in discussion about writing a play based on the LP since after its initial release, but had no idea of how to approach it.
Forty years later he sidestepped the concept of trying to literally interpret the album as a theatrepiece and instead simply used it as a thematic guide. It works very well, is very evocative.
The images are from the Aardman Animation accompaniment to the last few minutes of the play, broadcast simultaneously on various websites at the time of the original airing of the programme.
The cast includes Rufus Sewell, as the schoolteacher Mr Baggott and his superhero alter-ego Ethics Man and Welsh renaissance man Iwan RheonasThe Boy. He’s more commonly known as happy psychopath Ramsay Snow/BoltoninGame of Unsympatheticmonarchistshitebags. Link to the audio under the title line at the top.
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
