Absurdly Tragic, Tragically Absurd

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	• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Tom Stoppard Grove Press, 1994 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 80 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Absurdly Tragic, Tragically Absurd

This play is such a gem. It has entertained me for years (30 years I believe). I cannot recommend it to enough people.

A grand aimlessness

I first saw this as a film. It was so good that I bought the VHS version.

The characters' existential wonderings are a bit of a smack in the face. And yet, there is a certain laughing at the darkness. Call it whisteling past the graveyard.

We all know the end, but we argue against it until is it upon us. And even then. And that is what it is. In the end, aren't we all supporting characters in someone else's play?

And we all call for some direction....

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"Uncertainty is the normal state"

Sometimes a book we read a long time ago becomes newly relevant in unexpected ways.
Forty years ago, the plight of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern resonated with a generation scarred by the Vietnam War. These two bit players are mired in uncertainty. They "were sent for, in a matter of extreme urgency" - "there was a message, a summons", but they have no idea what is expected of them. They feebly protest: "we are entitled to some direction.. I would have thought".

Their bewilderment yields to submission when they meet Claudius and Gertrude, who entreat them to divert Hamlet and uncover the cause of his melancholy. R&G are "kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened". They are swept into a whirlpool of events over which they have no control. "Uncertainty is the normal state" concludes Guildenstern (or is it Rosencrantz? Their names and roles become increasingly confused as the play progresses).
"We only know what we are told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true".
When they think they have grasped what their mission is, the mission changes: instead of humoring Hamlet, they are supposed to deliver him to his death.

While they are still grappling with this revelation, the situation changes again: now it's R&G who are to be killed.
"Who'd have thought that we were so important?" muses Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern tries to retrace the sequence of events:"There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it".
Their death is pointless, gratuitous. As the corpses pile up on stage, the play ends with Horatio's epilogue:
"..so shall you hear
of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,
of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
and in this upshot, purposes mistook
fall'n on th' inventors' heads: all this can I
truly deliver".

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Brilliant.

No mean to be offensive or anything, but I honestly feel that if people do not find R&G Are Dead hysterically funny and/or wonderfully ingenious, they have probably missed Stoppard's point in this play.

This play was during the age known as Theatre of the Absurd, when ridiculous plots and characters were used to overall convey themes about life and people's preposterousness. As one can see, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are precisely such characters, as is their plight.

It should be noted that this play is a much more valuable experience for the reader if he has read Shakespeare's Hamlet previously, as it is R&G that serve a purpose in the play. However, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was not written to enforce the thematic points of Hamlet, I simply recommend it to give readers a different perspective. And it is a wonderfully funny perspective, at that.

It is a wonderful work. I highly recommend it for those who are not too fixated on trying to find a deeper meaning with Hamlet, because that simply is not the reason for this play's existence.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is the fabulously inventive tale of "Hamlet" as told from the worm's-eye view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare's play. In Tom Stoppard's best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of "Waiting for Godot" resound, where reality and illusion intermix, and where fate leads our two heroes to a tragic but inevitable end.

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