Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Synopsis

Intelligent comedy based on two minor characters from Hamlet. The play turns the spotlight onto the apparently inconsequential experiences of the two minor courtiers in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are by turn comic, tragic and philosophical as they try to make sense of the pointless and arbitrary nature of their own existence.

Our Review:

23 September 2002

Theses have been written and brains battered into painful submission in the attempt to distil meaning from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Try it by all means.

Alternatively, you can accept the play in performance on a very simple level as a play which literally plays - and that right joyously with the very nature of theatre and performance. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are 'called' to play their very limited roles in the story of Hamlet and find themselves spending most of their evening backstage together, with neither clarity of their history nor control of their destiny, and with only sporadic grasp of their identity. They attempt, in the main hilariously, to make sense of their predicament.

It is useful to remember that the play dates from 1967, when British theatre was still strongly influenced by absurdism. The parallels between our two protagonists and Beckett's Estragon and Vladimir (themselves based on Laurel and Har...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 7 October 2002:

A very funny production of an excellent play; the staging suits the words and (lack of) action very well, and the two actors playing R + G contrast very nicely in the way one questions continuously and the other just accepts what's going on. This is well worth the petrol money!...

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