This is SUCH a brilliant play! You absolutely need to read this if you liked Hamlet. Actually, you need to read this if you hated Hamlet, too. Just read this after Hamlet and you're guaranteed to have lots of fun. Although it parallels Waiting for Godot in many respects, I found Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be finer in humour and character construction; but then again, this one also has Shakespeare in addition to being overtly metatheatrical, which I think is quite hard to beat.

ROS: To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped on to his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now, why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?

GUIL: I can't imagine. (Pause.)

Karmic retribution for false friends...Hamlet: "Thou hast killed me in thine heart...and now in my true heart let thy execution take place; to false friendship - a dungeon that neither you nor I shall be condemned to...let thy execution be my final act of friendship." (So sorry Bill!)

I read this play in 1967 - that was the year Evergreen Magazine published it in its entirety.

It was Canada's Centennial Year, and we were hosting the World's Fair in Montréal. My family had driven there on a Saturday, and so Mom and Sis, my Dad and my Bro, and myself alone - once there - each separated and did our own recce's. At the appointed time we were to meet at the vast carpark.

André Gagnon’s buoyantly sunny Piano au Soleil was bopping down on me from the car park loudspeakers. I bought the magazine while waiting for them there.
***

Once home again, I found myself, that Sunday, amazed at Stoppard's intellectual acuity. And like me at the time, his cultural outlook was humorously existentialist.

Like me as well, he is small 'c' conservative with a touch of libertarianism.

I devoured it in an afternoon. A New literary star was born!

You don't get to heaven without deciphering the world's game. And Stoppard/Shakespeare's dangerous duo are dangerous at that point because the vision of evil has burnt them out. Whaddya do about it?

Like Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, they quip about it - gravedigger style.

Well, I had inherited my Mom's black sense of humour, of which for her the apogee was to be seen in Edward Gorey's books. So I could dig Stoppard, even though he appeared pretty facile.

His dialogue resembles verbal firecrackers!

So you can well imagine the next day, at high school, I had a ready stock of wit to display to my fellow nerds, loitering round our lockers.
***

Four stars, friends. For though Stoppard flirts with profundity he never long pursues it.

Stoppard sees life as a mere joke. Small wonder, for when as a mere child his folks fled Nazi Czechoslovakia for faraway India, he felt his life as overwhelming culture shock.

Still, life's not an absurdist game. It's an ordeal - as any modern introvert knows (though perhaps Amazon has now declared war on us, I don't know, with the new push to 'extrovert' us all)!

But we Aspies had it right at the outset: life hurts and then you die. Sorry, it's no joke. Try curing That, Herr Doktor Asperger!

So Stoppard lives on the surface. A pretty Rough surface when you get to old age, Tom?

But, still, you know, you've gotta laugh with him all the way to the Beyond.

When, at last, the hounded Christian introverts among us will find our peace and profundity.
***

Here in Ontario, today our neighbourhood has become nothing but - as Voltaire once quipped about Canada - "quelques arpents de neige" (several acres of snow).

On the surface, Canada hasn't changed much since the eighteenth century.

But deep down, inside my own aspie self, I know life's not a joke to dumb down with stats and weather bulletins, as our media would have it.

Life's not a boring game.

And neither is it absurd.

No -

For been-there-done-that Rosencrantz's screamingly Woke skullduggery -

Is only the fast lane to hell.