Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two courtiers in Hamlet . They are bit-parts, really, essentially messengers who are also friends of Hamlet. They are sent away from the court for a while, they come back, have some exchanges with Hamlet. They are given a letter, and end up being killed. If Tom Stoppard hadn’t written a play about them, they would be a footnote in a list of Shakespeare’s minor characters. There is no real exploration of their characters. Hamlet is this great, psychologically-rounded, existentially traumatised character. Then there are these two. Basically puppets. What Tom Stoppard does is switch it so that they are the main characters, but they have no backstory. They don’t really know who they are, or even which one is which. And they don’t even particularly care. The play is full of these little jokes. Hamlet appears, and so do members of his family. Claudius and Gertrude and Ophelia appear, and when they do it’s very wittily and brilliantly done. They are still speaking lines from the Shakespeare play. So it’s like you are being trollied off and on in an actual performance with these characters. Quite often there are gaps where they don’t know what’s happened during the gap. There’s a bit where they appear on a boat, and they don’t know how they got there. They have this letter, so they read it. There’s a sense of them as lost souls. They keep asking each other questions about what is going on. Another joke that plays all the way through is this joke about chance and fate. They start off by tossing a coin. I think it lands heads-up 94 times in a row. I can’t remember if it’s Rosencrantz or Guildenstern who wins, but that doesn’t matter. This is a post-Samuel Beckett world, the world of absurdist drama. It’s extremely bizarre and extremely funny in a bleak, nihilistic way. Hamlet is itself a meta-play. There’s a play within a play—you know: the play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king The players from that play are characters in Rosencrantz & Guildernstern are Dead . So they are meta anyway, already. Then there’s a scene with lots of jokes about how they all have such terrible roles, because it’s one of those revenge plays: everybody gets raped or murdered. All their entertainments involve being horribly killed. Which hasn’t changed much, has it? There’s one bit where The Player, the main tragedian, dies horribly. You think he’s been stabbed. It’s quite visceral. Then he stands up again. Everyone is going to die in this play, and there are lots of jokes about that, and bleak references to the fact that we are all mortal. Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are aware of themselves as only being needed for this particular play. It’s just so cleverly done, and I think of it as a more intellectual prequel to Shakespeare in Love , where Stoppard does very similar things, mixing in Romeo & Juliet , and less obvious Shakespeare plays as well. There are lots of jokes about theatre in Shakespeare in Love . At the same time it does what I think the best retellings do: it makes you see Hamlet , the play, differently. You think of the workings of it in a different way, about the gaps in a play, how it is pared down. I think it refreshes watching any play, really, because it’s about theatrical staging more generally. I loved it. I also saw the stage version ten years ago, and I loved the freshness of it. It felt like a completely different version of Shakespeare’s world to anything I had ever seen before. I loved the jokes in it—the scene where Shakespeare has a quill, and is balling up pieces of paper and throwing them into a bin, like the screenwriter of film cliché with his Remington typewriter. There’s lots of stuff like that—just him running around trying to write a play against time. That probably is like working in Hollywood. Shakespeare has loads of ideas that are a bit crap, and the titles are a bit rubbish, and people are always suggesting alternatives. I loved all that. Shakespeare in Love doesn’t take it too seriously, but it does make a serious contribution to how you think. There’s this idea of the great genius, a white male whose genius just pours out of him, and we must all bow down before him. But this is much more expedient, the plays are just something he throws together to beat his deadline, or to keep somebody happy, or pay off the debt. I think a lot of writers can empathise with that. The idea that Shakespeare had all that crap to deal with as well—and didn’t know he was Shakespeare —I love that. Hilary Mantel said she wanted to walk along the corridors with the people who didn’t know what was going to happen. I love that you can do that with Shakespeare too. He just thinks:’ I need to write a play.’"