The tension between what was center stage and what was offstage was the subject of the entire evening. There was an audacity and freedom to the way Stoppard's characters lurked in the wings of Shakespeare's most perplexing tragedy, missing the point and inflating their own importance - they were the ants, without the rubber tree plant. The theatrical experience of 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,' which I saw in London during its first run in the 1960s, was an intellectual tennis game between playwright and audience, with Shakespeare's original text as the net. No, I think the problem is that this material was never meant to be a film, and can hardly work as a film. The rewrite would play just as successfully on the stage as the original, I suspect, and the anachronisms did not bother me, and the direction is competent and the casting defensible on the grounds that Oldman and Roth have been interesting before and will be interesting again. Either his rewrite was too drastic, or his anachronistic references to future inventions are a distraction, or perhaps his camera is not confident or his cast ( Gary Oldman and Tim Roth) is badly chosen. What went wrong? Since the original play is such a triumph, it is tempting to blame Stoppard in one way or another. It lies flat on the screen, hardly stirring.

As a movie, this material, freely adapted by Stoppard, is boring and endless. As a play, 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern' is fascinating we use our knowledge of 'Hamlet' to piece together the half-glimpsed, incomplete actions of the major players, whose famous scenes we see a line or a moment at a time.

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