Thursday, March 31, 2011


Except for some edited (or dropped) speeches, some funny physical business and the larger crowd scene for the ending eliminated, CR honors us with the whole play.  The physical comedy written into the play but not played is a real loss, though.  Stoppard’s theatricality is not just verbal: his early plays are full of physical humor. Sometimes he employs variations on tried and true gags (there's even a pants falling down scene in R&G) but often the visual and physical jokes are outrageous and completely integrated into the plot.

He added even more to R&G in the movie version, which he directed, including a running gag of Rosencrantz offhandedly inventing all kinds of things, including the Big Mac.  (The movie DVD, by the way, is well worth obtaining, especially for the extensive interviews with Stoppard, Roth, Oldman and Richard Dreyfuss, whose performance as the Player is terrific.) 

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