Knowing I was going to a Tom Stoppard play, I wasn’t expecting to leave without a number of great quotes or moments swarming about my mind.  I definitely enjoyed the many humorous themes in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” such as minor characters focusing their intelligence on minor issues like the probability of coin-flipping without fully grasping the larger, connected concept of fate that loomed all around them.  My greatest interest, though, came from a very serious issue in the play, and reality, dealing quite poignantly with the reality of plays regarding death.  When Guildenstern speaks about the lack of value in acting out death, I was never more aware of the frailty of fiction as an emotionally engaging technique.

The scene where the acting troupe shows off their ability to convincingly fake deaths beautifully articulated the difference between acting and real life.  Guildenstern argues with the leader of the acting troupe, saying fake deaths don’t really lead people to confront their own mortality, because they know actors are just acting, and if they pretend to die, they will soon get up and probably die again, without permanence.  Guildenstern then seems to take a sword from the leader and appears to run him through.  The actor hunches over and collapses to the floor, with Guildenstern eulogizing, “If this is our destiny, then that was his, and if there are no explanations for us, let there be none for him.”  The viewer feels like Guildenstern has proven his argument about the ineffective pointlessness of fake death by showing us the disturbing meaninglessness of real death; a moment later, the fallen actor rises, and we feel foolish for thinking the murder was real.  Obviously we were watching a play: Guildenstern didn’t have anything in his hand, and even the lack of a prop did not stop us from accepting the murder as theatrically real.

Their interest in death enables Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to take on a humanness, allowing us to empathize with their fate, which really differs little from our own.  We, too, will die, and just as all the deaths around us, real and pretend, continue, our mortality will not concern us as it should, or be treated as anything more than an idea shortly after we face it.  Rosencrantz thoughtfully pondered, “Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death?  There must have been one.  A moment.  In childhood.  When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever.  It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory.  And yet, I can’t remember it.”  As many times as death steps into our world, exchanging glances or messages with us, we will still march about importantly, blowing off this acquaintance as a minor character in our lives.