This play, and the subsequent movie, is hilarious. My British Literature introduced me to it last year, by recommending the movie. I rented it, and was amazed, as it was one of my first exposures to intellectual humor (as opposed to slapstick and vulgarity and whatnot).
I’m memorizing a portion of the beginning for speech class. It’s the part where they’re trying to figure out why the coins keep coming up heads, and the implications of such a string of events.
One of my favorites. I like the movie, loved the play (never seen it live, but I’ve read the damn thing a half-dozen times) For such an amazingly well written play, it’s not very quotable. Few good one-liners, most of the really clever stuff is in dialogues, and you have to quote six or seven lines just to get the point across.
However, I have never yet passed up an opportunity to slip in mention of a conspiracy of cartographers, when appropriate.
Heads.
Heads.
Heads.
Heads.
I like to count how many scientific inventions and discoveries (anachronistic or not) that Rosencrantz accidentally runs across during the course of the movie:
The Player: “The old man thinks he’s in love with his daughter.”
Rosencrantz: “Good Lord! We’re out of our depth here!”
One of my favorite movies. Oldman and Roth are brilliant. Even Richard Dreyfuss (who IMHO hasn’t done anything decent since The Goodbye Girl) was great.
I love the verbal tennis match.
The “Questions” game in Whose Line Is It Anyway? always reminds me of that scene.
Ever tried it with a friend? It’s hard!
What’s it like?
Well, would ya tell me already?
Tell you what?
How should I know?
(Ebert hated it, but he must have not been paying attention. I love the movie - but taking a glance at Amazon, it looks like it’s hard to find a copy these days, even on VHS… it used to come on Bravo on occasion, but I never knew when so I was never able to tape it…)
Isn’t that a foul?
Life in a box is better than no life at all.
i love the play… stoppard is brilliant.
this can be especially appreciated when seeing it performed. it becomes a million times funnier in performance, ezpecially the theatre humour, where it becomes obvious that ros and guil are in a false, unreal, confined space, one which they cannot escape from.
i think this is where the movie fell down for me. it was good, but nowhere near the brilliance of the play, since the play was loaded with so many purposeful inconsistencies based on the suspension of disbelief.
i did like the inventions in the movie though.
Yeah, Stoppard is brilliant. Anybody ever read any of his other works? I particularly loved Arcadia, although it seems I’m in the minority with that…
Never seen the play, loved the movie, especially the end with the pirates…
R&GAD is hilarious! I saw the movie on PBS years ago, taped it (this was in high school, mind you…) and even got my mom hooked. I’d kill for a good DVD release…
“You can’t not be on a boat.”
“I’ve frequently not been on boats.”
“What you’ve been is not on boats.”
Rosencrantz: Shouldn’t we be doing something… constructive?
Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?
Guildenstern: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
Rosencrantz: Or just as mad.
Guildenstern: Or just as mad.
Rosencrantz: And he does both.
Guildenstern: So there you are.
Rosencrantz: Stark raving sane.
Anyone know where to find out about possible DVD release dates?
I like the play much more than the book-- like gex gex said, the humor and sadness of the story are much more apparent when they are surrounded by mostly black space, with a few set pieces appearing now and again.
Some of my favorite bits:
“Twenty seven questions he got out and answered three. I was waiting for you to delve. ‘When’s he gonna start delving,’ I asked myself.”
“We got his symptoms, didn’t we?”
“Half of what he said meant something else and the other half didn’t mean anything at all.”
“Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of The Rape of the Sabine Women–or rather woman, or rather Alfred–get your skirt on, Alfred!”
Absolutely my favorite movie. I intro’d it to friends, and so now every so often we jump into a game of Questions.
Even did the “In a box” speech for a Theatre class.
Hey, maybe I can get some opinions on my pet theory - Oldman’s character represents Intuition and Roth’s character is Logic.
Think about it - Roth keeps trying to organize everything into logical catagories, while at the same time ignoring the fantastic
ideas that Oldman (Intuition) keeps coming up with out of the blue. Meanwhile, Oldman doesn’t see his own ideas past the “fun”
quotient. Just a thought.
Absolutely brilliant. I’ve pretty much got it memorized through sheer dint of repeated readings and viewings.