The play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" by Tom Stoppard - one of the most important playwrights of the modern theater, an apologist for the theater of the absurd - was first performed in April 1967 in London at The Old Vic theater. At that time, T. Stoppard was a budding playwright and theater critic known to little. By the will of the playwright in the play, two modest characters of William Shakespeare's play "Hamlet", Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or people who did not say "no" in time, became the heroes of modern dramaturgy and of our time.
The well-known classical plot of W. Shakespeare is masterfully played in the play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of the Danish prince Hamlet from his childhood and studies at the German university, are invited by King Claudius, the murderer of Hamlet's father, to accompany the prince to England. The king hands them a secret letter asking them to behead the rightful heir to the crown. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accompany Hamlet to certain death, but after the prince successfully exchanges the letter, they themselves fall into the snares of fate.
Researchers of modern dramaturgy emphasize that the play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" cleverly fuses classic Shakespearean dramaturgy and Beckett literary experiments, the aesthetics of the absurd, and intellectual puzzles, virtuosic word play - with English irony. The dramatist tells the story of Hamlet from the perspective of two secondary characters of W. Shakespeare's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and made them the main ones. This creates an effect as if a video camera was left on somewhere behind the scenes during the creation of "Hamlet" - fragments of W. Shakespeare's texts sound in the background, Ophelia, Polonius and Hamlet himself appear and disappear, and T. Stoppard's characters try to understand what their real role is in this confusion. , in Shakespearean times.
The director Jurijs Butusovas claims that he especially appreciates the poetics of this play, which is already called a classic, and the possibilities dictated by the classic stylistics of the absurd. "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" very aptly hits the context of today's pains and should remind the audience of the lost paradise, the impossibility of human perfection, harmony, and happiness. In the theater, the illusion in J. Butusov's performance will be revealed and strengthened by the laconic, unexpected materials and textures created by the play's artist Mariaus Nekrošius and the costumes. This play is staged in the Lithuanian theater for the first time.
