Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Two minor characters from the play 'Hamlet' stumble around unaware of their scripted lives and unable to deviate from them. Showing events from the point of view of two minor characters from Hamlet, men who have no control over their destiny, this film examines fate and asks, Can we ever really know what's going on? Are answers as important as questions? Will Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (or Guildenstern and Rosencrantz) manage to discover the source of Hamlet's malaise as requested by the new king? Will the mysterious players who are strolling around the castle reveal the secrets they evidently know? And whose serve is it? —Mark Thompson <mrt@oasis.icl.co.uk> Guildenstern, observant, sharp-witted and gifted for word-puns, and his mate Rosencranz, slower and often caught in words, even switching their own names, make a long journey on horseback, contemplating fate, memory and language while their flipping of coins produces heads invariably for over a hundred times. Then they meet a traveling theater troop, which offers for a few coins to let them watch a play, participate as guest actor or in a 'private rape enactment'. Then the magic of the theater transports them to the grand palace Elsinor, where the hospitable Danish royal couple kindly asks them to stay a while and help find out and hopefully cure the gloomy, confused state of prince Hamlet, whose Shakespearian drama the court is living trough, yet the title heroes remain largely occupied with the futile hazards of daily life. Soon the very same theater troop arrives to play at court, as part of the Bard's tragedy, whose leader simultaneously forbids them to stop watching their real play on the road which can't exist without a audience and explains some of the plot and logic of conventional rules of plot-staging and -writing, till their own real fate is settled... —KGF Vissers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two Elizabethan courtiers from Shakespeare's Hamlet, struggle to come to terms with their relationship to the script that controls them and their existence, in this adaptation of Sir Tom Stoppard's meta-theatrical play. —mistera20000 The characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from "Hamlet" are summoned to the royal court of Denmark, supposedly to get some answers on why their old friend Prince Hamlet has become so gloomy. Unable to remember their own identities and any part of their lives prior to the arrival of the messenger, the duo are mysteriously transported from a forest to the castle of Elsinore. There they unwittingly play their parts in the court's intrigues, while trying to figure out what is happening to them. They converse about fate, but are unable to escape it. Hamlet is unexpectedly aggressive with them, and is plotting their deaths. —Dimos I