Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)

I actually listened to the BBC production of this. Both the play itself and the production are quite good. I saw a production of this off-Broadway during the '90s and it was great. I was surprised at the bits I remembered. ( )

Is it strange that I usually retread this right after Christmas? ( )

Existential rambling within nihilistic comedy within tongue-in-cheek parody all wrapped up as a good way to spend a Friday night!

Bravo! ( )

Just, eh. I know a lot of people love it but I don't see what's to great about it. Maybe I read it too quickly or didn't dig deep enough but this book just didn't really do it for me. It's short enough that I didn't feel like I wasted my time reading it though. I did however recently see a short bit of the film adaption in which R&G are flipping a coin and enjoyed it quite thoroughly (the class that day was on randomization and probability) so perhaps I should revisit it now that I'm a bit older. ( )

Works like this are proof that the boundary between fanfiction and independent art is completely arbitrary, and perhaps totally meaningless. Yes, this play is a derivative work of Hamlet, but not only does it not really require you to have read its famous forebear (although you certainly should, for many reasons beyond giving this some context), but Stoppard's reflections on mortality, chance, and the contingency of life stand on their own. There is no reason whatsoever that philosophy can't be funny, and even on the page the dialogue and action is hilarious, as poor old R & G wander through this frequently metafictional work that fills in the gaps of Hamlet, meeting their ultimate fate in a way that's both inevitable given what happens without their knowledge in Hamlet as well as poignant purely on its own. I could go on and on about how skillfully Stoppard uses tropes like the play-within-a-play, or how he nods to other famous existentialist works like Waiting For Godot, but this is about as close to a perfect comic play as it gets these days. ( )