Fifty years ago the then 29-year-old Tom Stoppard had a brilliant success with his clever Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which has now returned to its original home, The Old Vic, in an excellent production by David Leveaux.
Stoppard’s engaging existential tragicomedy is full of puns and wordplay, a mixture of parody and allegory, which keeps actors and audiences on their toes. You have to concentrate if you want to keep up. The action takes place inside Shakespeare’s Hamlet, observed from the point of view of Hamlet’s university friends, two confused and doomed innocents, who are caught up in events they don’t understand.
