If you like absurd and comedic theatre this is a good play for you. Although not in Beckett's league, Stoppard does a good job of exploring the meaninglessness of the human condition using the postmodernish setting of a theatre itself performing Hamlet. I like the inclusion of the audience, and the bewilderment of the two lead characters, which reminds you of Vladimir and Estragon. ( )

By the fifth page, I wanted to kill them myself. This spinoff of Shakespeare's masterpiece produces two of the most annoying/frustrating characters I have ever seen. Their rediculous antics and annoyingly repetitive dialogue help to create characters the reader is glad to see killed off. This book is not for everyone (including me) and I would most likely never recommend it, especially to students. However, if I was forced to recommend it someone, it would only be to HS seniors enrolled in AP/Honors English, since they would have studied Hamlet as juniors. ( )

Uncertainty is the normal state: Sometimes a book we have read a long time ago becomes newly relevant in unexpected ways.
Forty years ago, the plight of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern resonated with a generation scarred by the Vietnam War. These two bit players are mired in uncertainty. They "were sent for, in a matter of extreme urgency" - "there was a message, a summons", but they have no idea what is expected of them. They feebly protest: "we are entitled to some direction.. I would have thought".

Their bewilderment yields to submission when they meet Claudius and Gertrude, who entreat them to divert Hamlet and uncover the cause of his melancholy. R&G are "kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened". They are swept into a whirlpool of events over which they have no control. "Uncertainty is the normal state" concludes Guildenstern (or is it Rosencrantz? Their names and roles become increasingly confused as the play progresses).
"We only know what we are told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true".
When they think they have grasped what their mission is, the mission changes: instead of humoring Hamlet, they are supposed to deliver him to his death.

While they are still grappling with this revelation, the situation changes again: now it's R&G who are to be killed.
"Who'd have thought that we were so important?" muses Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern tries to retrace the sequence of events:"There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it".
Their death is pointless, gratuitous. As the corpses pile up on stage, the play ends with Horatio's epilogue:
"..so shall you hear
of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,
of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
and in this upshot, purposes mistook
fall'n on th' inventors' heads: all this can I
truly deliver".

Honestly didn't like this much. It may be because I read it immediately after I read Waiting for Godot, but I thought it relied way too much on that work, and was way too pleased with itself, to stand on its own as literature. ( )

A silly, yet provocative take on two minor but important characters from Hamlet. An existential take on Elizabethan drama that provides much to think on. ( )