Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

In this witty, erudite comedy, the author has had the brilliant idea of taking two of Shakespeare's classic nonentities - Hamlet's school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - and elevating them to the center of dramatic action. By the same token, Mr. Stoppard has relegated Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius to secondary roles, mere foils for the actions and springs for the ruminations of the two principal characters, who seem to have more in common with T. S. Eliot's Prufrock and Samuel Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon than with their Shakespearean namesakes. The result is a haunting, dazzling play which on reviewer described as "the Court of Elsinore seen from he wings by two attendant gentlemen who know nothing about themselves except what they can pick up from the cryptic lines they overhear." The author reveals that the play was inspired, or at least occasioned, by the National Theatre's production of Hamlet, with Peter O'Toole, which he saw in 1964. It was his agent who suggested there might be a funny play to be written about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and his initial version was pure farce. "Then something alerted me to the serious reverberations of the characters," Mr. Stoppard said in an interview with the New York Times. "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the most expendable people of all time. Their very facelessness makes them dramatic; the fact that they die without ever really understanding why they lived makes them somehow cosmic."