Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard

I've been a little bit busy of late and have not had time to write on the blog - however, I have tried to keep up with my reading.  This too, is hard when the work gets a little on top of you.  I've been away on two back-to-back camps and it was tiring.  However, I have been reading little by little none-the-less.

A box of books that my school library were getting rid of appeared mysteriously in the staffroom a few weeks ago.  Take what you want was the requirement and rummaging through the box I stumbled upon a copy of Stoppard's brilliant play.

I remember seeing the 1990 movie with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in the early 1990's - the Blackburn Video shop had a VHS copy.  I think that I was the only one who ever hired it.  In those days I was a young Music student at an Arts University in Melbourne.  I'd just discovered Beckett and I had been introduced to Phillip Glass and Salvador Dali. I had a big Dali on the wall of my room and booked tickets in 1993 to see 'Einstein on the beach' when the first world tour arrived in Melbourne.  I listened for many hours to John Cage's beautiful Prepared Piano Sonata's as I discovered Minimalism, Surrealism and other forms of post-modernity in the arts.  So Stoppard's play appealed to me.

Re-reading this play, some twenty-two years later was interesting.  I was able to put things in better perspective, now that I have read Francis Schaeffer and particularly Hans Rookamakker.  My study into the worldview concept that began in 2005 - ten years ago - reading James Sire's 'Naming the Elephant' has put me in better stead to understand the place of this form of Art and view it, understand it from my perspective rather than a worldview forced upon me - as it was when I was younger.

The magnificent writing and fantastic humour of Stoppard's play strike you clearly at the beginning of the work.  It is a marvellous dialogue between out two protagonists (maybe victims, maybe solipsists)  as they discuss probability, socialism, existence and knowledge.  It is a scream to read and too many lines that could be quoted.

I stopped in Act 2 to read (selectively) Hamlet again.  Having the luxury to do that - which you don't in a theatre or watching the movie - made the read better and creates a burgeoning respect for Stoppard's play.

Lots of themes in this play are mentioned, issues of ontology, epistemology, logic and insignificance and many of these themes I mention in reading other works.  In this one - I just think that it is funny and clever.

5 Stars - Brilliant.