Review
Praise for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:
“A masterpiece, not unlike Shakespeare’s plays; it’s artfully, imaginatively written, multidimensional, and hilarious.”―New Yorker
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead . . . has proved its sturdiness and power to endure . . . It is, after all, the most performed, most studied, most earnestly analyzed and strenuously anatomized of all Mr. Stoppard’s plays: the foundation of his international career and the inevitable starting point for anyone wanting to appreciate him.”―Benedict Nightingale, New York Times
“A coruscatingly brilliant, endlessly thought-provoking masterpiece.”―Wall Street Journal
“In making Rosencrantz and Guildenstern . . . Stoppard mixed the poetic melodrama of Shakespeare with the doom-laden minimalism of Samuel Beckett and topped it with the slapstick of the Marx Brothers.”―Rolling Stone
“Very funny. Very brilliant. Very chilling. It has the dust of thought about it and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air . . . This is a most remarkable and thrilling play. In one bound Mr. Stoppard is asking to be considered as among the finest English-speaking writers of our stage, for this is a work of fascinating distinction.”―Clive Barnes, New York Times
“Astonishing ― a youthful prank bursting with theatrical mischief and literary flair.”―Washington Post
“A tour de force . . . Fascinating . . . A triumph.”―Roger Ebert
“Tom Stoppard’s lively twist on Hamlet . . . [A] metapharcical romp . . . Stoppard’s philosophizing playfulness is clearly indebted to the music hall absurdism of Waiting for Godot . . . Stoppard’s fertile wit keeps this three-act drama pulsing along . . . A subtle pathos, along with the playwright’s verbal sophistication, prevents the play from degenerating into a collegiate vaudeville . . . The language remains spry . . . It attains a comic lyricism that’s as funny as it is piercing.”―Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times
“Full of philosophizing, nuances and complexities . . . [An] absurdist tragi-comedy . . . Stoppard’s . . . writing is pristine.”―Charlotte Observer
“Like Beckett, Stoppard shows two figures struggling to find identity and purpose in a world that makes little sense . . . Stoppard is always praised for his intellectual ingenuity: far more important is how, even in his late 20s, he was obsessed with human transience.”―Guardian
“After the first night of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the National Theatre in 1967, Tom Stoppard awoke and found himself famous. It’s still a delightful shock, every few years, to be reminded how brilliant and engaging this play remains.”―Independent (UK)
“Stoppard’s too-clever-for-words little skit in the vicinity of Hamlet . . . This is absurdism 101 with a cultivated Oxbridge edge and an echo chamber of quotations and scattered emotional reverberations from the greatest enigma of a play ever written . . . A brilliant calling card.”―Sydney Morning Herald
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead feels as fresh and inventive as it must have fifty years ago when it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and catapulted Tom Stoppard to an international career that continues today. [An] occasionally baffling, always hilarious play.”―Talkin’ Broadway
“[A] brilliant play.”―Philadelphia Inquirer
“Stoppard’s intellectual word games and bits of comic business are exhilaratingly clever while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s antics as they stumble in and out of Hamlet make them part Abbott and Costello, part Laurel and Hardy, part Olsen and Johnson, and part Vladimir and Estragon . . . Invigorating brilliance . . . A literate and thought-provoking celebration of the spoken word.”―TV Guide
“Tom Stoppard’s . . . meta-theater masterpiece.”―A.V. Club
“[A] funny play . . . Stoppard wittily plucked two minor characters from Hamlet and created a dazzlingly wordy and deliberately confounding play . . . Although R & G is among the earliest of Stoppard plays, it has all the comic ingenuity and intellectual razzle-dazzle that has become his signature.”―Curtain Up
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead . . . [is] now a solid part of the Stoppard canon, and . . . it’s a treat . . . The two men become vehicles for Stoppard’s non-stop wit with words, flow of ideas and diddling with logic . . . As always, Stoppard’s cerebral work will leave some people energized by its storm of ideas.”―NewsWorks
“Intimate, funny and anachronistically atmospheric . . . Without doubt, the play resides within the traditions of the Theatre of the Absurd . . . Stoppard makes it so entertainingly witty, fun and ultimately affecting, you will hardly notice you have been being existential . . . A testament to Stoppard . . . Medieval yet modern, silly yet existential, and all around thoroughly entertaining.”―Metro Weekly
“This monumental and hugely successful play is a highly entertaining mind gym in which Stoppard uses a complex yet fluid dialogue between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern . . . to effortlessly explore the nature of our elusive and all-too-temporal existence.”―Limelight Magazine (Australia)
“A classic of absurdist comedy . . . Mr. Stoppard has fun upending expectations . . . [A] seriously amusing romp.”―CentralJersey.com
About the Author
Tom Stoppard was born "Tomás Straüssler" in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937 and moved to England with his family in 1946. Catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967, he has become recognized as a contemporary comic master, the brilliantly acclaimed author of The Real Inspector Hound, Enter a Free Man, Albert's Bridge, After Magritte, Travesties, Dirty Linen, Jumpers, New-Found-Land, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Artist Descending a Staircase, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), and Rock 'n' Roll. He has also written a number of screenplays, including The Romantic Englishwoman, Despair, and Brazil. In 2017, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature.
