by Tom Stoppard
First performed 1966
Comedy, Drama, Absurdist
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist, existential tragicomedy by Tom Stoppard, first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966 before its celebrated National Theatre production at the Old Vic in 1967. Stoppard takes two minor courtiers from Shakespeare's Hamlet — the interchangeable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — and promotes them to centre stage, while the familiar events of Hamlet unfold in glimpses around them. Summoned to Elsinore but told almost nothing, the pair pass the time tossing coins that keep landing heads, trading wordplay and riddles, and trying to work out who they are and what is expected of them. Caught in a story whose shape they can neither see nor escape, they drift steadily toward the fate the title has already announced. Widely compared to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Stoppard's play is a witty, melancholy meditation on chance, free will, death and the bit-players of history. It won the 1968 Tony Award for Best Play and was adapted into a 1990 film directed by Stoppard himself.