“What’s it about?” was a frequent response from bemused theatre-goers to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard’s first stage triumph.
Tired of being asked, Stoppard is said to have replied to a woman outside a theatre on Broadway: “It’s about to make me very rich.”
He later questioned whether he had said ‘very’, Hermione Lee writes in Stoppard’s authorised biography, but he had undoubtedly managed to transform his previously precarious finances.
For every puzzled spectator, there were many more ecstatic fans and critics, dazzled by the wit, brilliant wordplay and sheer daring of a young playwright who had turned Shakespeare inside out and placed the spotlight, not on the eponymous Hamlet, but on two minor characters from the same play.
First performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, the following year, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead made Stoppard, at the age of 29, the youngest playwright to be staged at the National Theatre in London.
From there, the play went to Broadway and had more than 250 productions worldwide over its first decade.
The honours he won at home and abroad included an Oscar for co-authoring the screenplay of the 1998 hit film Shakespeare in Love, and a record five Tony awards for Best Play. In 1997, he was knighted for his contributions to theatre.
He died at home in Dorset at the age of 88, surrounded by his family, his agent United Agents said yesterday. The cause was not immediately known.
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