Tom StoppardBesprekingen

The parts of this I loved, I really loved, but. Fuck this was frustrating to read, because so much of this play is men being Very Wrong and ignoring the women around them being correct.

Tom Stoppard, James Saunders, Harold Pinter

I remember enjoying this when I read it in high school, assigned by our English teacher on the heels of reading, analyzing, and discussing Hamlet. I haven't read Hamlet since then, but still enjoyed the re-read of this farcical play. A few times I wished I'd better remembered some of the details of what it is set around, but it didn't detract from my reading too much.

These two bit characters who were sent to spy on Hamlet are now the focal point, while Hamlet, the king, queen, and others of that ilk merely intrude upon Rosencrantz & Guildenstern's musings. The quick wit, back and forth, and the foreshadowing of the event that the very title lends knowledge to, make this a fun, snappy read. It's also very meta from time to time, and doesn't take itself too seriously. I'm sure some of it went over my head, and if I'd read Hamlet more recently, I may have gotten more out of it. But I am still glad I read it again and refreshed my memory of why I think of this book fondly.

I feel one must be in the mood
for moonlight and music and infinitude
to really enjoy this play.
But what do I know?

Entropically ironical,
chaotic and clever and Byronical,
and jolly and gay:
et in arcadia ego.½

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" è una commedia teatrale del drammaturgo britannico Tom Stoppard, scritta nel 1966. La pièce è una rivisitazione dell'opera di William Shakespeare "Amleto", vista attraverso gli occhi dei personaggi secondari Rosencrantz e Guildenstern.

La trama segue Rosencrantz e Guildenstern, due amici d'infanzia di Amleto, che vengono chiamati alla corte del re per spiare e indagare sull'insolito comportamento del principe. Tuttavia, i due non riescono a capire il significato delle parole e degli eventi che li circondano, finendo per diventare vittime della loro stessa ignoranza e confusione.

La pièce è caratterizzata da un intreccio di dialoghi comici e filosofici, che esplorano temi come la vita, la morte, l'identità, la realtà e la percezione. In particolare, la pièce mette in discussione la natura della verità e delle apparenze, suggerendo che la realtà può essere soggettiva e mutabile.

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" è una delle opere più celebri di Tom Stoppard e ha ricevuto numerosi premi e riconoscimenti. La pièce è stata spesso rappresentata in tutto il mondo ed è considerata un classico del teatro contemporaneo.

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The title "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is significant because it immediately sets up the central premise of the play, which is a reimagining of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" from the perspective of two minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

In Shakespeare's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are childhood friends of Hamlet who are summoned to the Danish court by Hamlet's uncle, King Claudius, to spy on Hamlet and determine the cause of his erratic behavior. In Stoppard's play, however, the focus is not on Hamlet but on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves, who are portrayed as bumbling and confused figures trying to make sense of the world around them.

The title of the play, with its blunt declaration that the two characters are dead, also foreshadows the tragic ending of the play, in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meet their demise offstage, as they do in Shakespeare's play. The title thus serves as a reminder of the inescapable fate that awaits all mortal beings, regardless of their status or importance.

Overall, the title "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is significant because it encapsulates both the central premise and the overarching themes of the play, while also signaling the tragic fate that awaits all human beings.

I haven't read any plays since high school, and I think we only read The Glass Menagerie and Macbeth. I also don't go to the theatre often (musical theatre, yes, plays...very seldom). That's to say I'm not particularly knowledgeable when it comes to plays.

But I was thinking about Shakespeare, recently, as one does—or, perhaps, just Hamlet—and remembering I had a copy of this (Goodreads tells me I've had it for ten years) decided it was high time I read it! It's a bit of an anomaly in my book collection as one of only two plays (well, I have an unread collected works of Shakespeare knocking about the place somewhere, which has a great many plays in it) but the film adaptation is one of my favourite pieces of Shakespeare fanfiction (ahem) so I picked the play up at an op-shop, at some point, apparently around a decade ago.

Right, so. Absurdist existential comedy! What's not to like? And what's left for me to say that hasn't been said before? Not really sure why I feel compelled to say anything but I guess I'm using this as a bit of a diary, or something.

Anyway, of course this is just brilliant. The snappiest dialogue that ever did snap, and Guil and Ros's offstage story is cleverly woven into the original narrative.

Reading plays is a little bit weird if you're not used to it (maybe it's weird even when you are) but this was a breeze and had me laughing out loud more than once. I would kill to see a stage production of it.

This won't replace my favorites, but I enjoyed seeing Stoppard's early work and the evolution of his ideas. Unsurprisingly, Dogg's Hamlet and Cahoot's Macbeth were the highlights for me.

A friend introduced me to Stoppard in school, before I moved to Czechia, and it was long after that I realized his connection. This is a lovely rediscussion of dissent in a way that hopefully was more accessible to western audiences than some of the samizdat.

Just as good as I remembered it being!

This play is pleasant enough, but basically its about how clever mister Tom Stoppard is rather than actually saying anything profound or interesting about human lives.½

Once again, I thought that I should redress my education and read some of the famous modern playwrights. Tom Stoppard was high on my list because I'd attended a performance of his "Travesties" and been very impressed. (In fact, it might have been watching this play that inspired me to try my own hand at playwriting....and I did have a play produced). But I'm not sure that Rozencrantz and Guildenstern really live up to their fame. I've heard a lot about this play. I think it might have been designated for study by High School students. Hence the fame. But I found it, overall, a little disappointing. Sure, the idea of a play about a play with a play inserted in the original being duplicated in the current play ......gives it a certain complexity and layering. But, for me, anyway, it is a bit of a cheat....just using Shakespeare's plot and super-imposing on it extra lines. Yes the introduction of the idea of probability into the plot was a new twist. and yes, there are some great lines there....such as the (wry, gentle...to Alfred) "Thank you we'll let you know". And: "no one gets up after death--there is no applause----there is only silence and some second hand clothes, and that's death". And, another from Rozencrantz...."Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn't mean anything at all."
So, yes, some good lines, and some good material with the players imitating life...but more so in imitating death. And this line from the Player: "Don't you see? We're actors---we're the opposite of people". Yes...it does make me think occasionally but, overall, I was underwhelmed. A lot of tricky stuff there from the super-imposition of R&G on Shakespeare's Hamlet. But maybe too much reliance on Shakespeare's ideas. I give it just three stars ...it was going to be two but as I've written this review, I realise that maybe there is a bit more in it than I originally thought.

Tom Stoppard plus Pink Floyd? This was too easy to like for me.
That said, it was almost too short and feels as much like music as a book. On second thought, that seems as much like a compliment as a criticism.
If you enjoyed Rosencranz and Guildenstern are dead or philosophical thought experiments and the Dark Side of the Moon, you really cant go wrong.

Arcadia is a tremendous play, and I'm sorry I've never seen it. I find reading plays difficult. My visual imagination is not vivid, and I'm unpracticed in reading between lines of dialogue to understand the emotions behind them and their possible effects on other characters. I had to read some of the scenes several times, and tried not to progress until I felt I had a good handle on what the previous scene was about. It took me several days to read.

I sought it out because Stoppard strikes me as the smartest and most serious playwright of my lifetime, even though parts of almost every one of his plays are laugh-out-loud funny. He seems to share my melancholic's understanding that the only way to face the tragedy that is human life is to embrace it with verve, braggadocio, and mockery. I think Lord Byron, who hovers around the edges of Arcadia while never making an appearance, understood this too. The first act of this play is positively hilarious, and there's a good deal of wit about the middle, too. When things wrap up (the audience realizing of course), it packs a real emotional punch. It's sad, but in a way that makes you realize you wouldn't have missed it for anything — much like life itself.

1869

Hermit, tortoise, tutor japes, a grand house, haughtiness, precociousness, chutzpah, caprice. The inventiveness, the dazzling compression of ideas and humour are all there. It’s easy to discount these now because Stoppard’s style is so familiar and consistent (and critics naturally yearn to say something new) but reading his works shows just why he’s in the canon. What impresses is not just the wealth of ideas and characters, but also the lack of any easy resolution. No single sound bite or “thought bite” wins out. So, although a slim volume of a play that obviously can be viewed in a single staging, a close reading of this text is well worthwhile.½

This play is both a historical and philosophical drama as well as a highly personal challenge from Stoppard, who didn't discover that he was Jewish until his 50s when a distant cousin got in touch with him. The author appears to make up for lost time with Leopoldstadt, a first-rate, epic, and impassioned declaration of his own origins. He asserts that forgetting one's forefathers is tragic in and of itself. To lose your name in a family album, as one character puts it, "is like a second death."

It is yet another play by Tom Stoppard that impressed me with its erudition and singular structure. But there was an undercurrent of emotion that built over the length of reading the play that overwhelmed me by the final scene. So many of the family members had succumbed to tragic ends over the course of the family history that there was a nostalgia of lives lived that was was dressed in the end with widows' weeds of death.½

Very amusing and very confusing at the same time. A perfect example of absurdist literature.

A film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes (Miramax, 1998).

Shakespeare writes Romeo & Juliet while having an affair with an actress.

B (Good).

It's corny and heavy-handedly manipulative. But somehow, I don't know how or why, it won me over by the end.

(Jan. 2023)½

Spring 2019 - audiobook/book;

The last book we taught this year, chosen last summer for our Existentialist piece to bookend teaching Hamlet in the end of the fall during our Shakespearean. I'm not a big fan of R&G, though I do take some amusement from it. The kids loved certain parts of it and were absolutely flummoxed by other parts of it. I still came out of it, the second time, feeling about as ho-hum about the text as I did reading it in college the first time.

The production is lavishly done with wonderful settings and costumes, the whole being a very enjoyable film which well deserved its many awards. Joseph Fiennes is very believable as the young, amorous and frustrated Will Shakespeare, attempting to write what will eventually be 'Romeo and Juliet'.

The fictional story blends seamlessly with the historical setting and some real characters; we particularly loved Dame Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth I.

We watched one of the extras too, with some of the cast and writers talking about the way the film was made - very interesting.

Recommended.

Longer review here: https://suesdvdreviews.blogspot.com/2024/03/shakespeare-in-love-joseph-fiennes.h...½

Somehow in college I stumbled upon a radio drama production of this play. My music appreciation professor, Cecil Isaac, put me onto it, I believe. It was amazing then (1991) and I really like it now. [author: Tom Stoppard] is an amazing writer, a true wordsmith and I am always picking something out that seems new. A new nuance or turn of phrase or something that just seems to bring new meaning to the text.

This weekend is our Cleveland Shakespeare Festival's last weekend for Hamlet (Saturday) and R&G (Sunday) and we hope to attend both, so naturally, I dusted off both and breezed through them again.

Wonderful! Someday I hope to see both produced on the same stage at roughly simultaneous times. That would be fun.

I'm torn about this one.

I feel like all of the actors turned in worthwhile performances, and that Christoph Waltz absolutely stole the show. He was beyond reproach, and I enjoyed how everyone else played their parts well enough that you could invest your opinions into each character's behavior and feel it was worth doing so.

I loved the concept of the ending, and how I went into this movie expecting certain tropes to be true of various characters, only to have those expectations turned upside down.

Having said that... Whomever cut 'Tulip Fever' has committed a gross injustice to the movie. More than once the movie felt rushed and sloppily put together, as if all of the right components were carefully crafted and submitted, only to have a toddler haphazardly glue them to a piece of construction paper.

I wanted to love this movie, and I still have so many good thoughts for the story. Maybe if it'd been a mini-series of sorts it could have been presented better.½

من هم تو نمایشنامه‌ی هملت همیشه به نقش این دو نفر فکر می‌کردم... همیشه اعتقاد داشتم بود و نبود این دو نفر تغییری تو روند نمایشنامه به وجود نمیاره و مرگشون هم یه واکنش شدید بوده. تو فیلم هملت به کارگردانی لارنس الیویه هم هر چند بسیار وفادارانه‌ست این دو نفر از داستان حذف شدن... خوشحالم دیدم فقط من چنین حسی نداشتم و این نمایشنامه رو خوندم.

یه نمایشنامه‌ی پست‌مدرن که حس می‌کنم جنبه‌های اجرایی جذاب‌تری داشته باشه نسبت به متن! مخصوصاً صحنه‌ی هفتم نمایشنامه... البته از ترجمه‌ی خیلی بد خانم سیمین زرگران هم نباید گذشت! نمایشنامه به شدت پر از اصطلاحات و تعاریف و تفسیرهای علمیه که مترجم از پس برگردانی‌ش به فارسی برنیومده و خیلی از جملات گنگه!

Phoenix Falmouth