From: reiher@ficus.cs.ucla.edu (Peter Reiher)
Subject: Re: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 92 15:33:27 GMT

In article <47232.2899213684@kiwi.gen.nz> rabbi@kiwi.gen.nz (Rabbi Bajzheet) writes:
>I finally managed to see this movie last night. Wow! It's got to be one of the
>best films I've ever seen. What other movies/plays/whatever has Tom Stoppard
>done?

Tom Stoppard is one of Britain's best known living playwrights.  He has
written a large number of plays in the last twenty five years or so.
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", his first play, is probably his
most famous, but he's had a number of other hit plays on both sides of
the Atlantic.  A personal favorite of mine is "Travesties", which makes
use of the historical fact that James Joyce, Lenin, and Tristan Tzara
(a major figure in the Dadaist art movement) were all in Switzerland at
the same time during WWI, filtered through the mind of a somewhat senile
ex-British consular official who keeps mixing up his relationships with
them with his participation in a production of "The Importance of Being
Earnest".  Among other things, it features a scene done entirely in
limericks, and the wonderful pun, "my art belongs to Dada".

Other Stoppard plays include "Jumpers" (acrobatic philosophers and a naked
woman on a swing), "Every Good Boy Deserves Favor" (a play about Soviet
political prisoners that requires a symphony orchestra to produce),
"The Real Inspector Hound", "The Real Thing", and "Hapgood".  Stoppard
is generally fond of subverting the idea of what a play should be like.
He is also extremely clever and witty.

Stoppard has a second career as a screenwriter, specializing in adaptations
of difficult novels.  He wrote the screenplay for "Empire of the Sun",
and, if memory serves, "The Russia House", among others.  "Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead" is the first film he directed.  I believe Stoppard
has also written at least one novel, but he is clearly best known for his
stage work.

>What was the coin flipping thing about? Was it just to demonstrate that they
>weren't really in the real world? 

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is too rich a work to admit just
one interpretation.  I have seen it speculated that the coin flipping 
business suggests that, while off stage from "Hamlet", R & G are more
or less in a twilight zone, where time doesn't really pass and nothing
really happens.  It could also be meant as a signal that R & G are
characters in a play (two, in fact - "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead" and "Hamlet"), and everything that happens to them happens not because
of the influence of physical laws, probability, or the results of their 
actions, but because the playwright chose to have it happen that way.  If the 
playwright chooses to have the coin come up heads several hundred times in
a row, it will, regardless of the odds against it happening.  The scene also 
serves to establish their characters.

>Why all the stuff aout Rosencrantz discovring
>basic physical laws all the time?

R & G are, among other things, Laurel and Hardy figures.  Like Laurel and
Hardy, there's a "smart" one and a "dumb" one - the "smart" one isn't nearly
so smart as he thinks, and the "dumb" one isn't nearly so dumb as the "smart"
one thinks.  The discovery of physical laws strewn throughout the film
might be meant as an indication of that.  One could also argue that one of
them is a talker, and the other more a doer, and this motif suggests the
greater efficacy of doing over talking.  This motif does not occur in the
play, and is probably also part of the tremendous effort Stoppard took to
make the film version of it more visual, and less talky.

--
		Peter Reiher
		reiher@wells.cs.ucla.edu