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Update (31 March 2024):
Just watched a live performance of this play in Toronto, with the lead roles played by Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd (Merry & Pippin from Lord of the Rings!), and I have decided to update my rating to 5 stars. This is a brilliant play, all the more so because Tom Stoppard wrote it when he was 29. Watching the play being performed brought out nuances that escaped me when reading it on the page.
Some additional thoughts:
- Truth is a matter of agreement and trust, not verifiability, because it is rooted in observations that are ultimately subjective.
- Language obscures as much as it reveals. Language can either be a garden exhibiting a profusion of delights and beauties, or a casket which seals them shut/entombs them from the naked eye forever.
- Life/art imitates art/life imitates life/art...in an eternal chain...
- Our actions are driven not by conscious choice, but by passion, desire and attachment. Only a few of us ever manage to tame these to live consciously, and even are at the mercy of forces and events we can do nought but respond to. If the world is a wave, each man is born at a different height of the crest, to differing levels of clarity. Some of us are born to be lead characters, and others extras. But the faith we place on the written and spoken word is immense. Ultimately we all want to believe or accept that things are proceeding a certain way for a certain reason, because it brings us relief.
- All that we do - art, scientific reasoning, religion - is but a response to and an attempt to rationalize the fear of death.
- A single word or timing of chance and circumstance can seal our fate.
--
Quotes from the play: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes...
A rambling satire about the alchemy of time and chance, probability and determinism, destiny and free will, morality and hypocrisy, and the struggle to find truth and beauty amidst society's cruelties and injustices.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, sent on a quest that proves to be their doom. In this play, Stoppard attempts to weave a profound exploration of life and existence out their brief appearance.
While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can sense that they are part of something bigger that they can't fully see and haven't been told about, they lack the courage and imagination to do anything about it, to break out of the grip of what feels like destiny. Character indeed turns out to be fate. Even when presented with a warning of what might befall them, they fail to see the message. They see and discuss everything but the obvious. Neither Rosencrantz, for all his slippery guile, nor Guildenstern, for his sincerity and tendency to over-analyze, are able to determine the wider context and trajectory of the seemingly absurd events unfolding around them. On several occasions, they sense an ending coming but fail to realize its full import.
Perhaps this play is meant a satire on the plight of the marginalized who are usually excluded from the grand narratives of history and opportunities to shape society, by way of R and G's confusion at not knowing the full extent of the forces that shape, toss, turn and ultimately extinguish their lives.
Or maybe it's about hierarchy and exploitation: R and G exploit the minor characters in their play as much as they themselves are exploited by the major characters in Hamlet. But while Rosencrantz remains cheerfully dense and self-involved throughout, it is only Guildenstern who comes to appreciate the fragility of life when his own life is forfeit.
Maybe it is also a sideways satire of the acting profession itself: how it attempts to recreate the dramas and deep rhythms of life, but in attempting to pay homage to it in recreation, also parodies it and makes a mockery of its attempted seriousness. Human beings need an audience to feel alive and on their best behavior, and so perhaps that's why they invented religion and the performing arts.
To fully appreciate this play, it helps to be familiar with the plot of Hamlet. But I guess postmodern plays may not be for me. Like Waiting For Godot, I found hard to stay interested, with only the knowledge that this is a classic keeping me going. The absurd, seemingly meaningless dialogue belies a profundity that is not easily discernable in a first reading, but it does bring to mind Wittgenstein's rants about the vagaries and imprecisions of language: that nobody ever really knows if we're speaking the same language to one other and truly understanding each other, or just associating meaning to sounds and riding off the consistency of constant conjunctions between word and response that we observe in the world.
Either way, not the easiest or most interesting read, but it does have its moments of clarity, pathos and profundity.
Just watched a live performance of this play in Toronto, with the lead roles played by Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd (Merry & Pippin from Lord of the Rings!), and I have decided to update my rating to 5 stars. This is a brilliant play, all the more so because Tom Stoppard wrote it when he was 29. Watching the play being performed brought out nuances that escaped me when reading it on the page.
Some additional thoughts:
- Truth is a matter of agreement and trust, not verifiability, because it is rooted in observations that are ultimately subjective.
- Language obscures as much as it reveals. Language can either be a garden exhibiting a profusion of delights and beauties, or a casket which seals them shut/entombs them from the naked eye forever.
- Life/art imitates art/life imitates life/art...in an eternal chain...
- Our actions are driven not by conscious choice, but by passion, desire and attachment. Only a few of us ever manage to tame these to live consciously, and even are at the mercy of forces and events we can do nought but respond to. If the world is a wave, each man is born at a different height of the crest, to differing levels of clarity. Some of us are born to be lead characters, and others extras. But the faith we place on the written and spoken word is immense. Ultimately we all want to believe or accept that things are proceeding a certain way for a certain reason, because it brings us relief.
- All that we do - art, scientific reasoning, religion - is but a response to and an attempt to rationalize the fear of death.
- A single word or timing of chance and circumstance can seal our fate.
--
Quotes from the play: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes...
A rambling satire about the alchemy of time and chance, probability and determinism, destiny and free will, morality and hypocrisy, and the struggle to find truth and beauty amidst society's cruelties and injustices.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, sent on a quest that proves to be their doom. In this play, Stoppard attempts to weave a profound exploration of life and existence out their brief appearance.
While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can sense that they are part of something bigger that they can't fully see and haven't been told about, they lack the courage and imagination to do anything about it, to break out of the grip of what feels like destiny. Character indeed turns out to be fate. Even when presented with a warning of what might befall them, they fail to see the message. They see and discuss everything but the obvious. Neither Rosencrantz, for all his slippery guile, nor Guildenstern, for his sincerity and tendency to over-analyze, are able to determine the wider context and trajectory of the seemingly absurd events unfolding around them. On several occasions, they sense an ending coming but fail to realize its full import.
Perhaps this play is meant a satire on the plight of the marginalized who are usually excluded from the grand narratives of history and opportunities to shape society, by way of R and G's confusion at not knowing the full extent of the forces that shape, toss, turn and ultimately extinguish their lives.
Or maybe it's about hierarchy and exploitation: R and G exploit the minor characters in their play as much as they themselves are exploited by the major characters in Hamlet. But while Rosencrantz remains cheerfully dense and self-involved throughout, it is only Guildenstern who comes to appreciate the fragility of life when his own life is forfeit.
Maybe it is also a sideways satire of the acting profession itself: how it attempts to recreate the dramas and deep rhythms of life, but in attempting to pay homage to it in recreation, also parodies it and makes a mockery of its attempted seriousness. Human beings need an audience to feel alive and on their best behavior, and so perhaps that's why they invented religion and the performing arts.
To fully appreciate this play, it helps to be familiar with the plot of Hamlet. But I guess postmodern plays may not be for me. Like Waiting For Godot, I found hard to stay interested, with only the knowledge that this is a classic keeping me going. The absurd, seemingly meaningless dialogue belies a profundity that is not easily discernable in a first reading, but it does bring to mind Wittgenstein's rants about the vagaries and imprecisions of language: that nobody ever really knows if we're speaking the same language to one other and truly understanding each other, or just associating meaning to sounds and riding off the consistency of constant conjunctions between word and response that we observe in the world.
Either way, not the easiest or most interesting read, but it does have its moments of clarity, pathos and profundity.
