Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

 A-list playwright Tom Stoppard is a producer's idea of a scriptwriter you get in when you're looking for artistic chops. Amongst his many credits are Shakespeare In Love (1998) and Empire Of The Sun (1987) not to mention Despair for Rainer Werner Fassbinder, although perhaps the blame for that travesty should be left at the director's door, or at least so Dirk Bogarde claims. He was a co-writer on Brazil (1985) but in general I can't recall a film he's written that has not been awful.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is an adaptation of his own play, an apparently witty inversion of 'Hamlet', which looks at the events in Elsinore as experienced by a couple of minor characters from Shakespeare's play, the buffoonish Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, played by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. As the play was a hit and remains entrenched in the modernist literary pantheon I suspect that, as is so often the case, the re-setting of the text in the larger world of the cinema has defused the force of its verbal playfulness for in the hands of first-time director Stoppard it is more laboured than ludic and few coming at it for the first time in this guise will find it bearable.

 

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