1966 The first performance of Tom Stoppard’s career-breakthrough play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, was on this day at the Edinburgh Festival ‘fringe’, in the dusty Cranston Street Hall off the Royal Mile.
The performance was poorly attended and even more poorly received.
The Scotsman, Edinburgh’s premier paper, dismissed the play as ‘a clever revue sketch which has got out of hand’. Other reviewers were similarly unimpressed. Cleverness was always in over-supply at the Edinburgh fringe and there was no reason to suppose a major theatrical career was being launched.
There was, however, one rave review – by Ronald Bryden, successor to Kenneth Tynan as the Observer theatre critic. Tynan, a king-maker in the stage world, was now commissioning for the National Theatre and he requested a copy of Stoppard’s play. Long runs in London’s West End and Broadway ensued.
The three-act text performed at Edinburgh and sent to Tynan was an expansion of a one-act jeu d’esprit, written by the 27-year-old Stoppard in 1964. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead draws on the then fashionable theatre of the absurd, specifically Samuel Beckett. Vladimir and Estragon – with Prince Hamlet as Godot – were clearly models in Stoppard’s mind.
In Shakespeare’s tragedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are what Henry James termed ficelles – ‘strings’, whose only function is to make the plot move. They are brought from Wittenberg to Elsinore by Claudius (with malign step-paternal intent) and Gertrude (with benign maternal intent) to discover what ails their melancholic fellow student, the Prince of Denmark.
Hamlet soon perceives that they are spies and later callously arranges their death. When Horatio (another Wittenberg comrade) suggests it is rather hard that they should ‘go to it’, Hamlet shrugs off his homicide with the comment: ‘Why, man, they did make love to this employment. / They are not near my conscience.’
In Stoppard’s play the two courtiers quibble between themselves, ponder deep questions of free will and probability (there is much flipping of coins) and try, desperately and futilely, to work out what is going on in a machine in which they are mere incognisant cogs.
Playing with Shakespeare ‘metatheatrically’ was not new. Eliot had hinted at something like Stoppard’s play in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two.
One of Brecht’s exercises for his Berliner Ensemble in the 1950s was to replay the balcony scene (‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’) from the Nurse’s point of view, as if she too were eager that night to get away for a tryst with her lover. ‘Charles Marowitz’s Hamlet’, an absurdist 30-minute cut-up, had been performed at the Royal Shakespeare’s Theatre of Cruelty season in 1965.
Stoppard’s most likely inspiration (if there was one) was W.S. Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a ‘tragic episode: in three tabloids, founded on an old Danish legend’. Gilbert’s fantasia was first published in 1874 in Fun Magazine. P.G. Wodehouse and George Bernard Shaw took part in subsequent amateur performances and Gilbert’s playlet may well have influenced their own comedies. Gilbert’s plot has Rosencrantz (very sensible, unlike the crazed prince) marrying Ophelia. She it is who comes up with the ideal solution to the Hamlet problem:
A thought!
There is a certain isle beyond the sea
Where dwell a cultured race compared with whom
We are but poor brain-blind barbarians;
’Tis known as Engle-land. Oh, send him there!
Exit Prince of Denmark.