By Jason King Jones
To talk about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to talk about life in the margins—the margins of a story,
the margins of history, and perhaps the margins of our own lives. In Tom Stoppard’s 1966 breakthrough play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exist between the lines of Hamlet, summoned to Elsinore to serve a purpose they never fully understand. In Shakespeare’s play, their lives and deaths unfold offstage, out of sight, as footnotes in Shakespeare’s grand tragedy. Stoppard invites us into those margins, elevating the incidental characters to center stage.
This inventive approach to storytelling is what first drew me to Stoppard’s work. In college, I directed his absurdist one-act After Magritte, a play that, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, delights in taking ordinary characters and tossing them into extraordinary, nonsensical circumstances. After Magritte isn’t Stoppard’s best play (though it did inspire my passion for mid-20th century absurdist painters), but his expansive intellect and wicked humor inspired me to learn more.
My fascination with Stoppard deepened when I spent a semester in London, where I took a deep dive into two playwrights: Shakespeare and Stoppard. In my research, I stumbled upon Mel Gussow’s book-length interview with Stoppard, and that window into his restless, mischievous mind became one of my most treasured discoveries. Stoppard’s blend of razor-sharp intellect, linguistic play, and profound sense of wonder made me realize that theatre could be a playground of the heart and mind.
Stoppard’s plays aren’t just intellectually thrilling—they’re remarkably generous to actors. I know this firsthand, having had the privilege to inhabit Arcadia not once, but twice. In undergrad, I played Bernard Nightingale in Arcadia, a character with an ego as large as his intellectual blind spots. Bernard barrels through life convinced that the story can be solved, that with the right evidence and a bit of flair, history can be tamed. Years later, in graduate school, I returned to Arcadia, this time as Septimus Hodge—a man who knows better. Septimus understands that knowledge is slippery, that entropy always wins, and that even in a world governed by mathematics, there’s room for poetry and mystery.
That dual experience—playing first the bluster, then the quiet resignation—gave me a profound respect for the balancing act Stoppard performs in all his plays. He marries three key elements: intellect, humanity, and humor. And Stoppard’s humor is key to understanding his characters’ humanity.
You see, humor is at the heart of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Yes, it’s a play about mortality and fate and existential bewilderment—but it’s also uproariously funny. From the very first scene, where the laws of probability collapse into absurdity with a string of impossible coin flips, Stoppard signals that this is a world where the usual rules don’t apply.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might be trapped in an incomprehensible plot, but they are not above enjoying themselves along the way. They revel in wordplay, philosophical banter, and comic misunderstandings. Their verbal fencing matches—ping-ponging between profundity and ridiculousness—are some of the most joyous, mischievous stretches of dialogue in modern theatre. They crack jokes because they don’t know what else to do, and because sometimes laughter is the only sane response to an insane world.
There’s a particular kind of freedom in knowing how the story ends—not just for the characters, but for us. With the ending guaranteed, we are liberated from suspense. We’re free to enjoy the detours, the jokes, the moments of pure silliness, without constantly wondering what’s next. We all know what’s next. Stoppard invites us to enjoy the game anyway.
If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the bewildered innocents of the play, the “Player” and his ragtag troupe of tragedians provide the world’s clearest commentary on what’s happening. The Player understands the rules in a way Rosencrantz and Guildenstern never will. To him, the world is performance, and performance is survival. His troupe lives (and dies, and lives again) to please the audience, to enact whatever version of reality the paying public demands. In his world, death is easy—just part of the act.
The Player’s cheerful cynicism highlights one of the play’s central tensions: is life a performance, or is performance a metaphor for life? Are we all acting roles that were written long before we stepped onstage, or do we improvise as we go? The Player insists there’s no real difference—we perform whether we realize it or not. It’s all scripted, all inevitable, but within that inevitability, there’s still room for style.
The scenes between Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the Player are among the richest in the play. The Player’s knowingness is both comic and chilling, as he gently reminds our protagonists (and us) that the only guarantee in any story is the final curtain.
When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered in 1966, it spoke directly to a generation questioning authority, purpose, and meaning. The world had become too large and too complex for tidy narratives. Stoppard captured that anxiety in two bewildered men and a Player who tells them (with a smile) that stories end the way stories end, whether they understand them or not.
That disorientation has not faded—if anything, it’s grown sharper. Today, we live in a world saturated with a myriad of conflicting stories, all competing for our belief. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we try to stitch together coherence from fragments. Like them, we laugh—not because we don’t care, but because sometimes humor is the best way to cope with chaos.
That’s what I carry with me into rehearsals for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at PSF this summer. The lesson Stoppard has taught me, across years of reading, performing, attending, and directing his work, is that we cannot escape the end. But we can choose how we play the game.
I think about Bernard, convinced history can be solved. I think about Septimus, who sees the beauty in what can never be fully known. And I think about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who fill their fleeting time with banter, questions, and games, until the inevitable arrives.
Of course, there’s the Player: the one who understands the game from the start, who accepts the inevitability of the final bow and plays his part with flair. Maybe, in the end, he’s the closest thing the play has to a philosopher. If life is theatre, he reminds us, then why not make it a good show?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. But as the curtain rises, we see them playing games, asking questions, and seeking meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. So, despite what the title says, and despite what happens at the final curtain, these two characters in this absurdly hilarious world will always be very much alive.