A Game of Questions

[tealin]

WARNING: Excessive consumption of this script may be hazardous to your sanity.

Lately, while working, I've been listening to the DVD of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It's well-acted and very dialogue-dependent* and the script is fantastically clever and entertaining. The trouble comes when you actually try to figure things out. It's – well, it's theatre of the absurd, so... it's absurd, but one can't help trying to piece things together and try to explain why the title characters are there, how they got there, and ...well, why anything. My roommate has a theory, and it goes like this:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ... are dead.

This is a fascinating theory, and if you pay attention you can pick up all sorts of clues that might back it up, but what does it actually solve? Is this some sort of wacky afterlife? How can they die again? Or do they die? Someone reports they do, which isn't conclusive in itself, but in the words of whoever said it, 'That's all we have to go on.'

Now, the theory I had come up with** upon viewing this film in high school is that the Players (or rather the Player and his cohorts) insert these hapless travellers into a work of fiction; they get literally 'caught up in the action' as the Player had promised – so the whole time they're at Elsinore, they're in the play. Not as actors, pretending, but the play, the fundamental thing that a stage production seeks to reproduce. It's sort of like a virtual reality except without the goggly things and the suits; they are actually there.. This is the purpose to the random pages that keep blowing through scenes: they are a visual reminder that we are in a work of fiction. This is an old game to the Players, and I suspect they have gone through this a lot with any number of victims. The Player himself does say he has been here before, and knows his way around – probably the plot as well as the castle, if not better.

This still doesn't explain why Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are wandering around the woods in the first place, or who summoned them ... but for that I draw inspiration from Jasper Fforde: they are fictional characters. The summoning – the first thing they remember – is the author calling them into being, the woods are the sort of inter-fictional limbo from which they must jump into their assigned roles, and the Players and their cart are the intermediaries who perform this function.

Like I said, complete rubbish.

An interesting line, though... when describing what they do, the Player says 'We transport you back into a world of intrigue and illusion' – Back? Is it just an endless cycle?

All scholarly postulating aside, I am still of the opinion that it would be wicked cool if Dreamworks made an animated version with Miguel and Tulio in the title roles. Road to El Dorado is practically theatre of the absurd already (whether it was meant to be or not) and they've got almost exactly the same personalities as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, so why not? At least this movie would actually have a PLOT. And cleverness. And be marketable to a grand total of ... ooh, five people?

*I have to keep my eyes on my work, see. Triplets of Belleville would not be a good movie to listen to while working. I like movies that might as well be radio plays for this purpose.
**Or arrived at without really thinking about it so therefore it's probably all rubbish.

Comments

[veronikamg.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with Hamlet, but I take it R and G were bi-characters in it? Well, in that case they ARE dead! I saw the film in high school, and much the only thing I remember is that they all died. Every single person.

We're learning about Shakespear in litterature right now, and his opinion was that all the world was a stage. Just let me get my notes, and I'll post a long boring comment. ;)

[just-curious.livejournal.com]

The point of the play is that Stoppard wrote R&G as a background to Hamlet, a backstage. Whilst Hamlet and Horatio are doing there thing, Stoppard is explaining what R&G are up to, and what lead them to their eventual demise. So, at the end of the play(s), both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, but are they like this at the beginning of the film? I would say that this is not Stoppards intention, it seems to me that it was an absudist way of explaining Horatio's comment to the First Ambassador at the end of Halmet "He never gave commandment for their death." An odd phrase, because Hamlet did command their death, yes? When he wrote the paper ordering the british (?) to kill them on arrival.

However, at the crucial moment in stoppard's play, when Ros and Guil discover they are going to die... they do nothing about it, and thus they cause their own deaths.

So, are Ros and Guil dead? I don't think so, not until the end. Did I make sense? Hell no! :D

And be marketable to a grand total of ... ooh, five people? Oh, be nice Tealin! I'd say at least a dozen... on a good day!

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

they do nothing about it, and thus they cause their own deaths.

They're on a boat ... there's no way off. It's die at the hands of the players or die in the ocean.

[just-curious.livejournal.com]

But they didn't die on the boat, and the players didn't kill them, they were hung in England (? - darn, why can I not remember the country!) because they still gave the english government the letter. That's why they caused their own deaths, and that's the tragedy of the play. They discovered Hamlet had set them up to die, but rather than actually change their future (like run away, or destroy the letter) they continued on with the pre-written plot.