Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Lyttelton - National Theatre
5/5 based on 2 reviews (read reviews)- Opens: To be announced -
Booking until: To be announced
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead photos
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead description
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead follows two men who have been summoned to a tragedy nobody has explained to them.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have perhaps six minutes on stage in Hamlet and are dispatched to their deaths in a line. Tom Stoppard's play gives them everything in between: the corridors, the waiting, the coin that keeps landing heads, the travelling players who seem to know how this ends. Elsinore's plot passes through in fragments while the two of them try to work out what they are for, and run out of time before they manage it.
The play made Stoppard's name. It was first seen on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966, staged by the National Theatre the following year and won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1968; Stoppard's own film of it took the Golden Lion at Venice. This production closes the year in the Lyttelton Theatre.
The play is by Tom Stoppard, whose Arcadia, The Invention of Love and Leopoldstadt have also been major London productions, and who won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love. The director is Robert Hastie, Deputy Artistic Director of the National Theatre, who ran Sheffield Theatres and directed Standing at the Sky's Edge.
Mawaan Rizwan, the BAFTA-winning creator and star of Juice, plays Rosencrantz, with George Fouracres of Saturday Night Live UK, who has also played Hamlet at Shakespeare's Globe, as Guildenstern.
Book tickets for the funniest play ever written about not knowing what is going on.
