Friday, April 28, 2017
R & G
I thought Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was very interesting, and very different from any play I've ever read. Before reading the play I was curious as to how a whole play was written based off of two extremely minor characters from another play. Stoppard masterfully structured the play to portray the two characters who exist simply through what is written about them in Hamlet. Overall, it is an interesting and effective way to comment on existentialism by Stoppard. R & G spend the whole play searching for meaning which they never find. Stoppard seems to also be saying that humans push forward to death, trying to give themselves meaning before it comes, but do have no right to be afraid of death, as no living person knows what it entails.
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R + G was a very difficult play for me to understand. It was very meta to the point where I didn't know what was going on. With that being said, it was very interesting. It was like the other side of Hamlet. A play within a play, with another play by the Tradginians going on. It was also interesting that they lost their memories and identity towards the end of the play. Their fate was totally based on Hamlet, without him they are nothing.
I enjoyed all the meta aspects of Rosencratz and Guildenstern. To me, I kind of didn't understand it at first because I didn't know we had to think about it like they are characters on a stage. However, after realizing this I found the play to be very understandable and to me it was more about the characters themselves just trying to find their place in this one story where they can't change the ending. They try to make choices which proves futile because 1. They never pan out and 2. They still can't change their fates. I enjoyed the new style that the play had to offer even though we knew what would happen in the end because of the journey we got to see before it all.
I like the unorthodox perspective that this play brings to the more classical play of Hamlet. Shakespeare originally provides little background to the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, so Stoppard builds on that in his own narrative. Instead of making them seem like normal people that only are a part of Hamlet's life, Stoppard depicts them as having no other life except in regards to their importance of Hamlet. They were not even conceived until the messenger came to summon them to go spy on Hamlet. We know this is not true because they went to school with Hamlet, but because no background is given in either play, their true existence doesn't start until then.
Honestly I wish we could have done this play at STM. I feel like I could learn a lot more about the play by actually being a part of it. There are so many elements to a play beyond the script. It would be really helpful to go through the process of building the set, developing the characters, etc.
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