{"id":422,"date":"2007-07-01T21:27:03","date_gmt":"2007-07-02T02:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/wordpress\/?p=422"},"modified":"2007-07-01T21:27:03","modified_gmt":"2007-07-02T02:27:03","slug":"tom-stoppard-rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2007\/07\/01\/tom-stoppard-rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Stoppard – “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nAfter Arcadia<\/i><\/a>, I thought that Tom Stoppards other plays would also be worth reading. I approached this one with great expectations, but was really disappointed.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the play are, of course, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet<\/i>. Stoppard’s play takes place behind the scenes of Hamlet<\/i>, with Ros and Guil hanging around and spending most of the time wondering confusedly about what’s going on, why they exist, what’s expected of them etc.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe play is strongly inspired by Waiting for Godot<\/i>, which I didn’t much enjoy either. Absurdism is not for me. And the play is so obviously a young playwright’s first work, where he is trying hard to be clever and mature and funny. The result is both clever and funny but above all I found it very affected. He was trying too hard, simply. (And absurdist existential angst and confusion about the meaning of everything somehow just seems like such a teenage subject for a first work.) Although both the humour and cleverness obviously seemed genuine to other people because the play won all sorts of awards and apparently made Stoppard instantly famous.\n<\/p>\n

\nAfter one total hit and one total miss I’m not giving up on Stoppard but I will be taking more care when choosing the next work to read.\n<\/p>\n

\nAmazon US<\/a>, Amazon UK<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Arcadia, I thought that Tom Stoppards other plays would also be worth reading. I approached this one with great expectations, but was really disappointed. The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the play are, of course, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet. Stoppard’s play takes place behind the scenes of Hamlet, with Ros and Guil hanging […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}