Centres of Levity

Abstract

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was first performed on the fringe of the Edinburgh Festival in August 1966, Ronald Bryden announced ‘the most brilliant debut by a young playwright since John Arden’. The next April, when it was produced in London by the National Theatre, Harold Hobson called it ‘the most important event in the British professional theatre of the last nine years’. Arden’s social concern, John Osborne’s anger, and even Harold Pinter’s comedy of menace were beginning to seem moods of the past. For the moment, at least, the ‘university wit’ of this non-university journalist, who had rewritten Hamlet as if from a back-stage Beckett’s-eye-view, was all the rage. And indeed, during the next several years Tom Stoppard managed to come up with one surprising whirlwind of verbal and theatrical levity after another.