This is a major achievement, I daresay.
Having had no sleep in over 24 hours, one cup of tea, a couple sips of coffee with sugar and cream, and 3/4 of a plain bagel with cream cheese, I sat through and understood Tom Stoppard's, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. All three hours of it. I did not read the play prior to seeing it, though I have done a tremendous amount of work on
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(how was the bit at the end where the player discusses death, and acts out that scene, and then comes back alive? that's so lovely right there)
heads.
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The part where Guildenstern stabs him, right? It was really, really good. The whole stage applauded when he died, and Guildenstern was perfect (great actor, he was. He was what made it awe-inspiring, mostly.) Rosencrantz started crying when the player "came back from the dead," so to speak. It was silly. But it was very good. This company has such equity actors, it's almost scary.
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Oh nooo, it reads very easily and very very well, which is why i am in love with tom stoppard, but this is ok.
yes! that scene! i know the words almost by heart to the text, and rosencrabtz is lovely. another very lovely moment is, well, you know from hamlet when the queen calls them and then the king switches around their names bc we assume the queen was wrong? (or perhaps it was the other way around--too tired to think) but a very lovely moment is realizing that actually, she was right. heh. awesome of stoppard to put that in there. god.
(i want to see this. ah!)
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Awesome. I'm planning on, hopefully, getting to the bookstore this weekend and picking it up. I thought about it when I was actually at the bookstore a couple of days ago and I was like, "Ehh... let's see." Very good to know!
After the play, the audience got to ask questions of the company. The actor that played the player actually started talking about how in Hamlet no one's really sure which is Rosencrantz and which is Guildenstern; how in this play these "attendand lords" (not actually plurized in the poem â” TS Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred (!!! Alfred!) Prufrock, you know it?) are so used to being mixed up by people that they start to mix themselves up. It was quite interesting to think about how these two miniscule roles in Shakespeare have such depth and character in Stoppard's work. How every minor character (such as Hamlet, in Stoppard's play) can be major in another work; how every minor character in every play potentially has this whole complex reality of their own. Tres fantastique! (I ( ... )
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