Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Recognized today as a consistently clever and daring comic playwright, Tom Stoppard startled and captivated audiences when he retold the story of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an absurdist farce, focusing on the point of view of two of the famous play’s minor characters. In Shakespeare’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are little more than plot devices, in Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become the major characters while the Hamlet figures become plot devices. The wildly comic play becomes the story of two ordinary men caught up in events they can neither understand nor control.

This show runs in repertory with Hamlet.