Movies to see before you die - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead set the theatre world abuzz in 1967, taking two of the most minor characters from William Shakespeare's Hamlet and combining them with Beckett's Waiting for Godot to create a blend of cerebral vaudeville that ruminated on fate, life and death. Tom Stoppard, the playwright who wrote the stageplay (and, indeed, Shakespeare in Love) ended up directing the screen version because " nobody else would willingly "commit violence" to the play's script ".

The tale centres around the two nobodies who play minor roles in Shakespeare's Hamlet. A running joke throughout is that they are so unimportant nobody can tell them part, including themselves. They are summoned to Elsinore to cheer up the Prince who has been obsessing about the murder of his father and to "gleen what afflicts him".

These two outsiders are baffled by Hamlet's antics and confused about their mission. To make matters worse, they encounter a travelling band of tragerians, whose leader (played with gusto by Richard Dreyfuss), constantly keeps them off balance with his quips about the uncertainty of life and the absurdity of death.

Gary Oldman's Rosencrantz is delightfully wide-eyed and innocent (a wonderful performance from an actor normally sidelined into charismatic, villainous roles) whereas Tim Roth's Guildenstern comes across as quicker but more world-weary. It is he who notes near the end, "There must have been a point somewhere at the beginning when we could have said no. But somehow we missed it," commenting on how we all often find ourselves at the mercy of events.

The play's action occurs not from action, but from the scintillating zip and verve of the verbal razzle-dazzle, shooting from uncomfortable silences as Rosencrantz and Guildenstein try to figure out their place in Hamlet's labyrinthine plot and how to cope with the "unscripted" pauses between the play's action and sudden bursts of energetic verbal play. (Best illustrated in this clip.) Some of the play's message is lost in that regard – in the stage version it's easier to understand that when "offstage" Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are left wordless and lost, given to playing intense verbal games as a way of passing the time and to try and bring meaning to their brief existence, and there are many lost jokes that relied on the stage setting.

I think my favourite scene in the whole movie is Gary Oldman's wonderful monologue on death and the absurdity of it all, sprinkled with delightfully witty verbal tricks. ("You'd wake up dead, and then where would you be? … In a box.")

As an adaptation of the play it's based on it has been criticised for being leaden and lifeless and there are elements of that in the direction by Tom Stoppard who's obviously better behind a typewriter than he is a camera, but when it's good it's very very good indeed, thanks to a brilliant cast, with Roth, Oldman and Dreyfuss all standing out against the "supporting cast" of Hamlet that includes Iain Glen. Ian Richardson, Joanna Miles and Donald Sumpter. Iain Glen makes for a wonderful Hamlet and the brief glimpses of Shakespeare's play you see are enough to make me wish for a whole screen version with that cast.