ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD

An ideal companion to the current Franco Zeffirelli/Mel Gibson HAMLET, this is the film adaptation of Tom Stoppard's 1964 existential burlesque – Shakespeare's greatest tragedy viewed comically through the wrong end of the telescope. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are verbose palace flunkies at Elsinore Castle; they suspect that something's rotten in Denmark, “,hat with King Polonius all flustered and Prince Hamlet (lain Glen) so melancholy. But they never quite figure it out, even when an acting troupe (led by a marvelous Richard Dreyfuss) dramatizes the entire plot for them. Once a project by John Boorman, this was instead brought to the screen by the playwright himself in an auspicious directing debut, and filmed in Yugoslavia.