Tom Stoppard’s play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” is
the most famous modern example of a tour de force in which the
action in “Hamlet” is viewed through the eyes of two of the bit
players, Hamlet’s college friends, who accompany him on his trip to
England. We know “Hamlet” is about Hamlet. They think it’s about
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There’s an old joke about the actor
who is hired to play the gravedigger in “Hamlet.” “What’s it about?”
his wife asks. “It’s about a gravedigger who meets a prince,” he
says.
As a play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” is fascinating; we
use our knowledge of “Hamlet” to piece together the half-glimpsed,
incomplete actions of the major players, whose famous scenes we see a
line or a moment at a time. As a movie, this material, freely adapted
by Stoppard, is boring and endless. It lies flat on the screen,
hardly stirring.
What went wrong? Since the original play is such a triumph,
it is tempting to blame Stoppard in one way or another. Either his
rewrite was too drastic, or his anachronistic references to future
inventions are a distraction, or perhaps his camera is not confident
or his cast (Gary Oldman and Tim Roth) is badly chosen.
None of those explanations will do. The rewrite would play
just as successfully on the stage as the original, I suspect, and the
anachronisms did not bother me, and the direction is competent and
the casting defensible on the grounds that Oldman and Roth have been
interesting before and will be interesting again. No, I think the
problem is that this material was never meant to be a film, and can
hardly work as a film.
The theatrical experience of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,”
which I saw in London during its first run in the 1960s, was an
intellectual tennis game between playwright and audience, with
Shakespeare’s original text as the net. There was an audacity and
freedom to the way Stoppard’s characters lurked in the wings of
Shakespeare’s most perplexing tragedy, missing the point and
inflating their own importance – they were the ants, without the
rubber tree plant. The tension between what was center stage and what
was offstage was the subject of the entire evening.
There is no offstage in the movies. The camera is a literal
instrument that photographs precisely what is placed before it, and
has trained us to believe that what we are looking at is what we
should be looking at. Any medium that can make a star out of Mark
Harmon can make heroes of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. As for Hamlet
and his uncle, and Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes – if they’re
so important, where are they?
If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were interesting characters
on their own, this movie might yet survive its medium. But they are
not. They are nonentities, and so intended. The most memorable
performance in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” is the one by Richard
Dreyfuss, as the leading player of the visiting troupe, and he
becomes memorable in the time-honored way, by stealing his scenes.
(It is interesting that the Players, essentially dropped from the
recent Zeffirelli-Mel Gibson “Hamlet,” should make their comeback in
this backstage version.) The Dreyfuss scenes contain their own
energy, and do not depend on the tense juxtaposition of the Stoppard
foreground and the Shakespeare background.
The irony, then, is that the parts of Stoppard’s film that
work best are exactly the ones that have nothing to do with the
original inspiration behind “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.” To
examine this irony in another way, the movie “Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern” is about a troupe of players who briefly visit a story
about some bit players on the outskirts of a great tragedy. Talk
about opening out of town.
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