РефератыИностранный языкRoRosencrantz And Guildenstern A Essay Research Paper

Rosencrantz And Guildenstern A Essay Research Paper

Rosencrantz And Guildenstern A Essay, Research Paper


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 origin

al 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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