Uncertainty is the normal state: STC’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Ros. What are you playing at?
Guil. Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.

I’ve often found myself dumbstruck at the sheer ridiculousness of the largeness of Tom Stoppard’s capacious intelligence and the wit with which his plays hum and shimmer. There’s a capriciousness and cheekiness that seems to dance over and under and through his words and language with a barely containable verve. It’s a virtuosity that has made him a favourite of critics and audiences. But underneath his distinctive stylistic flair and mannerisms, there is a serious engagement and interrogation of not so much issues but ideas. However disorienting and impenetrable his works may seem on the surface, “the plays are highly ordered and underpinned with logic and a point of view;” nothing is accidental, arbitrary or apologetic in Stoppard’s work.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, written between 1964 and 1966, and first produced in 1966, Stoppard takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and asks what the relatively minor and interchangeable characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are doing throughout the course of the play while they’re not on stage. It’s been variously described as being ‘Beckettian,’ ‘absurdist,’ or ‘absurdist existentialism,’ but the truth is neither – rather, it’s Stoppardian, and therein lies the key to this, his most celebrated and produced play. A lot of the existential anguish which seems to run through Stoppard’s work is not, as has been assumed, indicative of a lack of meaning in the world. Rather, it is a lack of adequate comprehension of the world and its persistent niggling questions, and this is not critical but merely human.