Tom Stoppard (1937- present)

 

Tom Stoppard was born on 3rd July in Zlin. Czechoslovakia. He grew up in Singapore and India during the Second World War. Educated at school in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, he became a journalist. He wrote plays for radio and TV, including The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and A Walk on the Water.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966. The play won a Tony Award for Best Play (USA) in 1968. The Real Inspector Hound was first staged in 1968, followed by productions of Albert’s Bridge and if you’re Glad I’ll Be Frank: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1976) inspired by his friendship with Viktor Fainberg, who had been imprisoned in Czechoslovakia by the Soviets. Professional Foul (1978) was written for Amnesty International’s Prisoner of Conscience Year in 1977.
Tom Stoppard’s first play was ‘On the Razzle’, which was adapted from Johann Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich Machen, in 1981. His trilogy of plays sets in 19th century Russia, The Coast of Utopia, was first staged at the National Theatre in 2002. His latest plays include Heroes (2005), Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006), and The Hard Problem (2015). He has written the screenplays for adaptations of Anna Karenina (2012) and Tulip Fever (2014).
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967)
The play follows the timeline of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In between familiar events we are treated to the musings of Guildenstern and Vladimir, in a double act reminiscent of Vladimir and Estrogen from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have no idea why they have been summoned to the royal court at Elsinore. The coin has turned up heads eighty-five times in a row. At this stage, they can’t even tell which of them is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the first of many witty in-jokes and nodes to the audience.
Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are set in a medieval court. In Hamlet, Hamlet directs the players to act in this play, so he can observe his uncle’s reaction.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is Tom Stoppard’s play. The title characters are not part of the canonical Hamlet scene, but instead are ‘off-stage’ characters from the play. They arrive in an English being ruled by another Shakespeare character, King Lear.
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was not the first play to explore the duality of ‘acting’ and ‘performing’. Shakespeare’s Metatheatre is already a central concern in Shakespeare’s play, with its play-within-a-play.
Like Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are characters who appear not to be in control of their own destinies. They were sent for by Claudius and Gertrude, who want to find out what’s up with Hamlet. The key similarities between Beckett’s and Stoppard’s two post-war visions.
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are condemned to death before the play has ever begun-in a line taken from Shakespeare’s play- but it is oddly fitting because it overlays everything that the two characters do with a sense of futility. The modern world is at once absurdly tedious and repetitive and worryingly unpredictable, as the vents of the Second World War had shown perhaps more clearly than ever before lie in the rather helpless passivity of the central characters in each play.
If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are disposable, what about the royal line of Denmark? Tom Stoppard’s play ends much as Shakespeare’s does, with much of the court dead at each other’s hands. But then the same is true of Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Polonius, too. Everything in Hamlet appears to have been for nothing, too, and it is this truth about the nature of Shakespeare’s tragedy that this play brings so brilliantly into focus.