First performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead cemented Sir Tom Stoppard’s reputation as one of Britain’s finest comedy playwrights.
This is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with two very crucial differences. Firstly, it is told from the point of view of two minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who pop up briefly and periodically in Shakespeare’s play to advance the plot. Secondly, Stoppard has taken what is arguably Shakespeare’s most grim tragedy, full of death, madness, jealousy and rage and turned it into a comedy!
Whilst struggling to understand where they are, what they are doing and even which one is Rosencrantz and which Guildenstern, the story unfolds. We meet a disreputable raggle-taggle troupe of musical Tragedians and their enigmatic and bawdy leader, the original cast of Hamlet, including: the wicked usurping Uncle Claudius; Hamlet’s amoral and conflicted mother, Gertrude; the tragic weeping Ophelia; and the counterfeiting Hamlet himself.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, aided and abetted by the Tragedians, and betrayed by Hamlet, grapple with the increasingly absurd plot as they journey towards their inescapable fate.
It is, by turns, riotously funny, deeply disturbing and heartbreakingly sad, and remains as fresh and relevant today as when it was first unleashed on an unsuspecting and bemused public!
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