Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)

So I was sitting around watching TV on a Sunday afternoon... or

trying too, anyway. Tragically there was nothing on... until my eye

caught a title; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. My inner- geek answered "well duh. Read the play didn't I?" Of course my

inner geek is also curious as anything, so my geek and I turned

the channel sat back and watched as two befuddled, goofy

Shakespearian hooligans find themselves in Elsinor home of their

loony friend Hamlet. Now don't get me wrong, the dialogue goes

about 90 miles per hour, but the topics are Kevin Smith-like in their

randomness and the relationship between these two classic

characters also remind me of one Kevin would write. What's more the only way to know which is Rosencrantz and which

is Guildenstern is to look on the credits. Even they sometimes

aren't sure who's who. This movie is lightning fast and painfully

clever, definitely not for the faint of heart or head, but if you've got it

in you I *highly* recommend it.

Fmovies: Tom Stoppard directs the film version of his own hit play from the 60s. Tim Roth, Gary Oldman and Richard Dreyfuss star

Tom Stoppard claims that the idea behind his hit play 'Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead' was suggested to him by his agent: What happens to two small parts in Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' when they're off stage? Shakespeare reveals quite a bit about them (most notably, in the closing stages, when they are dead), but their own time on the stage is limited and they never have the opportunity to express real individual personality.

So Stoppard cleverly fills in the gaps, snaking his action through quotations from the original play. The two characters have as little idea about themselves as everyone else; they don't even know who is Rosencrantz and who is Guildenstern. They gradually piece together their stories as they overhear parts of the real play, stumble into the action, and meet a group of itinerant players who are also waiting to go 'on stage'.

It's a smart-alec literary gag with considerable potential for riffing on the mechanics of the theatre and the psychology of actors (making fun of the notion that they always see themselves as the centre of attention). In Stoppard's capable hands it's also a platform for questioning some of the central tenets of existence, and indeed what it means to exist. The play launched Stoppard's career as one of the giants of British theatre and a successful screenwriter (he's responsible for Empire Of The Sun and Shakespeare In Love). It also helped garner him enough clout to direct a $5million film starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, even though he'd never had any experience at the helm before. Sadly, no agent suggested a similarly fruitful way of successfully making the translation to the screen.

In fact, there seems to have been hardly any cinematic conversion at all. This film is stagey in the extreme. There's barely any movement and less momentum, the only additions are a few baggy extra scenes while countless subtleties are lost. Sure, there are a few nice props and bigger sets than you get in a theatre, but it's all so stationary it might as well be set on the stage. And even when there is significant action, it's usually an illustration of something the words are already doing rather than an end in itself. A horribly contrived, literal realisation of a game of verbal tennis on a palace court springs to mind.

All this just serves as a reminder that this is essentially a play about plays: not about films. A problem that Stoppard's adaptation roundly ignores. Conceits that work in the theatre are just annoying here. Anyone for a play within a play that's a rehearsal for a play within a play within a film? And the hammy head player, Richard Dreyfuss, and his group of clowns just seem like a distraction rather than the central issue. The sections from Shakespeare don't fare much better: Glen's Hamlet is deeply annoying, his sensual mother Gertrude (Miles) is decidedly unattractive and the evil king Claudius (Sumpter) is very likeable. So serious are all these faults that although there are fine central performances from Roth and Oldman (both wonderfully baffled) this film is just about unwatchable.

Verdict It's all too easy to tell that this is Stoppard's debut as a film director, and it's even easier to see why he hasn't made a film since. A disastrous adaptation of an excellent play.

According to family legend, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were responsible for my mother's having failed her English Literature A-Level, for which "Hamlet" was a set text. Rather than read Shakespeare's original she prepared for the exam by watching Laurence Olivier's film version, which was playing at her local cinema, several times. Unfortunately, she failed to realise that Olivier had used an abridged version of the text so was quite unable to answer a question about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who do not appear in the film.

I mention this anecdote because Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" revolves around the idea of taking these two minor characters, so minor that Olivier could afford to omit them altogether, and making them his protagonists. Another minor figure, the Player King, plays an important role, but some of Shakespeare's major characters, such as Hamlet himself, Gertrude, Claudius and Polonius, become minor ones in Stoppard's play. Stoppard's idea was to use Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as examples of the "little men" of history, playing a minor role on the fringe of great events while failing to comprehend their significance, and thereby to raise questions about the nature of reality and of human existence.

I saw Stoppard's play in the theatre during my university days and was enthralled by it. I loved his intellectual daring, his brilliant wordplay and the way in which his protagonists are both comic figures and, at the same time, tragic ones. The plot parallels that of "Hamlet" itself, but with the action seen from a different viewpoint, and includes lengthy scenes in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern speculate on what is going on around them or try to pass the time (by, for example, playing Questions) while waiting for their brief moment in the spotlight. Trying to summarise the plot any further would probably be pointless; the play has been described as an "absurdist, existentialist tragicomedy" which is probably the best way of summing it up.

I have never, however, been as enamoured with the film adaptation as I am with the original play, even though Stoppard himself not only wrote the screenplay but also acted as director, his only experience of directing a film. As he said, "It just seemed that I'd be the only person who could treat the play with the necessary disrespect". I think that the reason lies in the differences between the theatrical and cinematic media. (I am not alone in this; the critics Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert both criticised the film on this ground). The theatre is primarily a verbal rather than a visual medium, and this is particularly true of the modern theatre which has for the most part dispensed with the elaborate sets and costumes which were so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The cinema, by contrast, started out as a purely visual medium, and although the coming of the "talkies" in the late twenties introduced a verbal element, the visual element is generally at least as important as the verbal.

And Stoppard is an author who loves words. His play is full of puns, quibbles and word-games, written in a language which has little in common with everyday spoken English. In the theatre, which is both more intimate and more stylised than the cinema, you can get away with this sort of thing; it becomes a sort of game between actors in audience. In the cinema, more realistic and more remote than the theat

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead fmovies. This is one of my all time favorite movies. I love everything about it! The dialogue is ingenious, Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Richard Dreyfuss are all superb and the concept is original. I found it much funnier on the second viewing; there is just so much to take in. It takes patience; you are thrown in seemingly in the middle of something. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, minor characters in Hamlet wander into the events of the play on call for their dialogue, and in between try to figure out their existence.

Sadly there is no US DVD, and I think the VHS is out of print. I have an old laserdisc, and I have heard that there's a UK DVD. If you do run across this I couldn't recommend it more strongly!

I first saw the film version of R and G are Dead over a year ago, it is a set text on my course and our prof showed it because we live in the middle of no where civilization-wise and had no other way to understand the action. In a class with 21 16-19 year olds trying to catch the witty banter so important to the play was an irritating struggle so eventually I gave up and focused on just reading it and understanding the main techniques Stoppard used. Then last week my other English prof offered to show the film again, I jumped at the chance and yesterday I got to see it all the way through without interruptions. I loved it from top to bottom, everything was perfect, I was upset that I had been denied the experience a year ago but was delighted that I had that second chance to see it. The three things that I think make the film so wonderful are: the acting, the connection between R and G, and the script it self drawn so well from stage to screen. Scene that are partially Hamlet, partially R and G worked so well, the Shakespearian actors meshed so well with the more modern R and G which gave everything a congruity, from one scene to another nothing was lacking. The sensation of being lost was conveyed so well by Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, the way they always wind up in the same room in the castle and just shrug it off was spectacular, it really conveyed the sense of absurd reality. I was in awe of how well the two actors worked together, they seemed combined, just as intended in the play, and played off each other beautifully. The play itself came alive on screen, certain lines just seemed to stick out and summarize Stoppard's whole idea behind it. The chief tragedian's line I quoted as the title to this comment was spoken beautifully by Dreyfus and the later line about all the directions on a compass encapsulated the main ideas of the play excellently... All in all it was a wonderful experience and I adored it, I am so happy I finally got my chance to see this wonderful film and I suggest to anyone that if they can see this film and be open to it, it certainly isn't standard (which is the idea of absurdism) but it is wonderful and enjoyable. Also don't be scared to laugh at it, some people consider it high art or comparable to Shakespeare and think laughing is unwarranted, this is ridiculous there are scenes which are laugh out loud funny and they should be laughed at, nothing is above being laughed at in theatre, so relax and enjoy... one note though, read Hamlet first if you haven't or watch the film so you get the general idea, R and G are Dead makes no sense without a background knowledge of Hamlet, but I would suggest skipping the Kenneth Brannagh twelve hour snooze-fest version... but that is for another comment...

A wonderfully witty film masterfully transferred from a marvellous stage script to the screen.

The dialogue is constant and highly entertaining, the meshing of Stoppard's modern day speech of the original parts of the story and Shakespeare's original Hamlet practically seamless and masterfully worked.

Gary Oldman gives a superb performance as Guildernstern (or is it Rosencratz - and, at the end of the day, does it matter?) outstanding in a fabulous cast. All in all this film cannot be recommended highly enough.