Tom Stoppard

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

August 17th, 2005

Watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard at Bard on the Beach.

Of the three Shakespeare plays I've read, Hamlet is my favourite, and after having watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead the movie, I decided to see it performed in the legitimate theatre. It was really great, really funny, my favourite part coming at the very end, where Rosencrantz says "here must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said ... no." Hopefully I didn't ruin it by blurring out the last word before the actor did.

For those who don't know, the play centers around two minor characters of Hamlet who, obviously, get starring roles in this one, and find themselves meeting The Players, and then all of them finding themselves with the play Hamlet (without really knowing it). It's your basic recursive play, also touching on so many subjects it's hard to fit them in a paragraph, much less a sentence, but they include the nature of chance, reality, memory, acting, sanity, and, overall, death. The actors from the Bard on the Beach production of Hamlet played their scenes in this play (the actors who play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play, respectively, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz in Hamlet), and the only significant part that was "missing" from my experience having seen the movie was the puppet show.

They announced during the play that tickets were sold out, but the couple whom I sold my second ticket to was able to get in (meaning that they were able to themselves get a second ticket from someone), so I understand there's still a chance to see it this year. If not, hope that they put on a production next year, and if they do, I imagine I'll attend again.

Milan has an excellent review of the play, performed earlier at Bard on the Beach this year.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

June 5th, 2005

Watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead DVD.

Roger Ebert hated it, but I liked it. It was funny and is valuable to me as another view of Hamlet (which I've read and seen at least one movie version of), but this time from the outside. The two most striking scenes are the scene where Rosencrantz' ruminations on death and the scene where the players are performing a play that has marionettes describing what happens in a play in which the players are characters. Former blogger Mark Pilgrim quoted it at least three times: once on his weblog, another time in an article about XML, and as an email to a Mozilla browser list, the last one finally prompting me to watch it). I'll likely be watching the play performed this summer in Vancouver (which I will probably enjoy the most, since plays are never perfromed the same way twice), and then subsequently reading the play's text, which is probably the reverse order of how it should be done.

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