Stoppard Speaks

The weather cooperated, or rather it didn't.  Another rainy day gave me some time to dig into the interviews in the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead DVD set.  (See 6/28/15 post.)  First up was the interview with playwright Tom Stoppard.  The hour-long segment, while a bit dry and plodding at times, did provide some blogworthy items.

The play originated as a suggestion from Stoppard's friend and agent Ken Ewing circa 1963.  Although Stoppard stated that he ignores most suggestions for plays, this one became one of his projects.  Originally the play was to be about what happened to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern when they arrived in England.  This project required some background, though, and that is where Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead came into being.

When Stoppard decided to turn the stage work into a film, he took it upon himself to direct it.  (An earlier MGM venture had failed.)  His motivation was two-fold.  As an unknown talent (it was his first film), he figured it would be easier to get money for the project.  More importantly, though, he knew that the play was not a shooting script.  As such, it would need revision to become a successful screenplay.  He decided that he could trust himself not to revere or to defend the text and to change it as necessary.

The film won the Golden Lion Award at the 1990 Venice Film Festival.  Its competition that year included Goodfellas.  Stoppard's account of winning the award and of interacting with Martin Scorsese, the director of Goodfellas, is an interesting interlude.

The interviewer concludes the segment with some rapid-fire questions for Stoppard.  When asked what the play is about, the playwright replies that it is about two characters who never understand what's going on, right up until they are put to death.  Do the two characters know which is which?  Stoppard comments that they are so marginal that he has Claudius and Gertrude get confused over the two.  The problem is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trapped in the play; they have nowhere to go to validate who is who.

Lastly (for this post), Stoppard is asked whether the play is existentialism, absurdism or if he even cares.  He replies with the last choice of the three.  Labels are a byproduct of the writing, not the intent of it.  If he has to put any sort of label on it, he calls theatre a pragmatic art form.

There are three more interviews in the DVD set.  Stay tuned for future posts.