Rosencrantz & Guildenstern resources

R&G are Dead

Which one is which?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

scenes from the film . . .

Newtonian Physics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5_ayuaCzZs&feature=related

Gravity Question Court:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maI53H4Zbrs&feature=related

The funniest best of R&G:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRj_tpfrYHs&feature=fvwrel

PLAY A GAME?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Sx4W2cKlU&feature=related

R&G meet Hamlet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LO4EQcMR2Q&feature=related

There isn’t any wind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAxeLiaHmIg&feature=related

Tom Stoppard talks with Charlie Rose:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSnabj-Cc4&feature=fvwrel

Shakespeare on Film: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

MM‘s seventh week of Shakespeare on Film explores the Bard’s original comedy duo

By Daniel Rosenthal | Published July 11, 2008

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)
directed by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard originally sold the screen rights to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the stage comedy which made his name, soon after its 1967 premieres in the West End and on Broadway. He wrote a screenplay for MGM, then saw the project languish for twenty years until the rights were bought back and he rewrote the script and filmed it in what was then still Yugoslavia.

Film and play view the events of Hamlet entirely from the point of view of the Prince’s doomed friends as they travel to Elsinore, kick their heels ‘off stage,’ and sail to England. Tim Roth’s irritable, sarcastic Guildenstern, who’s not as clever as he thinks he is, and Gary Oldman’s garrulous, goofy Rosencrantz, who’s not as dumb as he appears, muse on why they have been summoned and how to plumb the madness of lain Glen’s mild-mannered, romantic Hamlet. Rosencrantz considers mortality in a rambling, banal equivalent of “To be, or not to be,” and keeps asking who he is, because Stoppard’s most persistent running joke—spun from the moment in Hamlet when Gertrude reverses Claudius’s “Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern”—is that neither they, nor anybody else at court knows which is which.

Stoppard likened this shabby, oddly likeable pair to “a Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello,” although their clipped, question-and-answer routines are more like the idle chatter of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: Beautifully timed, inconsequential and better suited to stage than screen.

Conscious that theatrical dialogues might not captivate a cinema audience, Stoppard introduces and over-indulges a new gag in which Rosencrantz casually makes “scientific” discoveries, including steam power, gravity and the hamburger. Yet no matter how often he sends the pair clattering up and down flights of wooden stairs in a suspiciously deserted castle, his methods, as The Independent on Sunday noted, “still reek of the stage.”

Today’s Quote of the Day:

“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds — if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it.” — Tom Stoppard

and more from

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern

Rosencrantz: Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You’d have a chance, at least. You could lie there thinking, “Well. At least I’m not dead.’

Rosencrantz: Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occured to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering. Stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occured to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squawling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, theres only one direction. And time is its only measure.

Rosencrantz: Shouldn’t we be doing something… constructive?
Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?

Rosencrantz: Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no… Death is “not.” Death isn’t. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I’ve frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no… What you’ve been is not on boats.

Rosencrantz: What are you playing at?
Guildenstern: Words. Words. They’re all we have to go on.

Player King: Audiences know what they expect and that is all they are prepared to believe in.

Rosencrantz: Do you want to play questions?
Guildenstern: How do you play that?
Rosencrantz: You have to ask a question.
Guildenstern: Statement. One – Love.
Rosencrantz: Cheating.
Guildenstern: How?
Rosencrantz: I haven’t started yet.
Guildenstern: Statement. Two – Love.
Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: Foul. No repetition. Three – Love and game.
Rosencrantz: I’m not going to play if you’re going to be like that.

Rosencrantz: This place is a madhouse!

Guildenstern: All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

Player: We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.

Guildenstern:We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Player: You don’t understand the humiliation of it– to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable– that somebody is watching . . . . We’re actors– we’re the opposite of people!

Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?

Ambassador from England: The sight is dismal / And our affairs from England come too late. / The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, to tell him his commandment is fulfilled,/ That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

— Tom Stoppard (from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead)