Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

GUIL: You'd be lost for words.

ROS: You'd be tongue-tied.

GUIL: Like a mute in a monologue.

ROS: Like a nightingale at a Roman feast.

GUIL: Your diction will go to pieces.

ROS: Your lines will be cut.

GUIL: To dumbshows.

ROS: And dramatic pauses.

GUIL: You'll never find your tongue.

ROS: Lick your lips.

GUIL: Taste your tears.

ROS: Your breakfast.

GUIL: You won't know the difference.

ROS: There won't be any.

GUIL: We'll take the very words out of your mouth.

ROS: So you've caught on.

GUIL: So you've caught up.

PLAYER ( tops ) : Not yet! ( Bitterly. ) You left us.

GUIL: Ah! I'd forgotten-you performed a dramatic spectacle on the way. Yes, I'm sorry we had to miss it.

PLAYER ( bursts out ) : We can't look each other in the face! ( Pau more in control. ) You don't understand the humiliation of –to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes of it existence viable-that somebody is watching… The plot was two corpses gone before we caught sight of ourselves, stripped naked in the middle of nowhere and pouring ourselves down a bottomless well.

ROS: Is that thirty-eight?

PLAYER ( lost ) : There we were-demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. ( He rounds on them. ) Don't you see?! We're actors-we're the opposite of people! ( They recoil nonplussed, his voice calms. ) Think, in your head, now, think of the most… private… secret… intimate thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy… ( He gives them-and the audience-a good pause. ROS takes on a shifty look. ) Are you thinking of it? ( He strikes with his voice and his head. ) Well, I saw you do it!

ROS leaps up, dissembling madly.

ROS: You never! It's a lie! ( He catches himself with a giggle in a vacuum and sits down again. )

PLAYER: We're actors… We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was. We were caught, high and dry. It was not until the murderer's long soliloquy that we were able to look around; frozen as we were in profile, our eyes searched you out, first confidently, then hesitantly, then desperately as each patch of turf, each log, every exposed corner in every direction proved uninhabited, and all the while the murderous King addressed the horizon with his dreary interminable guilt… Our heads began to move, wary as lizards, the corpse of unsullied Rosalinda peeped through his fingers, and the King faltered. Even then, habit and a stubborn trust that our audience spied upon us from behind the nearest bush, forced our bodies to blunder on long after they had emptied of meaning, until like runaway carts they dragged to a halt. No one came forward. No one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us; it was obscene. We took off our crowns and swords and cloth of gold and moved silent on the road to Elsinore.

Silence. Then GUIL claps solo with slow measured irony.

GUIL: Brilliantly re-created-if these eyes could weep!… Rather strong on metaphor, mind you. No criticism-only a matter of taste. And so here you are-with a vengeance. That's a figure of speech… isn't it? Well let's say we've made up for it, for you may have no doubt whom to thank for your performance at the court

ROS: We are counting on you to take him out of himself. You are the pleasures which we draw him on to- ( he escapes a fractional giggle but recovers immediately ) and by that I don't mean your usual filth; you can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires. They know nothing of that and you know nothing of them, to your mutual survival. So give him a good clean show suitable for all the family, or you can rest assured you'll be playing the tavern tonight.

GUIL: Or the night after.

ROS: Or not.

PLAYER: We already have an entry here. And always have had

GUIL: You've played for him before?

PLAYER: Yes, sir.

ROS: And what's his bent?

PLAYER: Classical.

ROS: Saucy!

GUIL: What will you play?

PLAYER: The Murder of Gonzago.

GUIL: Full of fine cadence and corpses.

PLAYER: Pirated from the Italian…

ROS: What is it about?

PLAYER: It's about a King and Queen..

GUIL: Escapism! What else?

PLAYER: Blood

GUIL: Love and rhetoric.

PLAYER: Yes. ( Going. )

GUIL: Where are you going?

PLAYER: I can come and go as I please.

GUIL: You're evidently a man who knows his way around.

PLAYER: I've been here before.

GUIL: We're still finding our feet.

PLAYER: I should concentrate on not losing your heads.

GUIL: Do you speak from knowledge?

PLAYER: Precedent.

GUIL: You've been here before.

PLAYER: And I know which way the wind is blowing.

GUIL: Operating on two levels, are we?! How clever! I expect it comes naturally to you, being in the business so to speak. The PLAYER's grave face does not change. He makes to move off again. GUIL for the second time cuts him off. The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.

PLAYER: Uncertainty is the normal state. You're nobody special.

He makes to leave again. GUIL loses his cool.

GUIL: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUIL: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUIL: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?

ROS: Hamlet is not himself, outside or in. We have to glean what afflicts him.

GUIL: He doesn't give much away.

PLAYER: Who does, nowadays?

GUIL: He's-melancholy.

PLAYER: Melancholy?

ROS: Mad.

PLAYER: How is he mad?

ROS: Ah. ( To GUIL : ) How is he mad?

GUIL: More morose than mad, perhaps.

PLAYER: Melancholy.

GUIL: Moody.

ROS: He has moods.

PLAYER: Of moroseness?

GUIL: Madness. And yet.

ROS: Quite.

GUIL: For instance.

ROS: He talks to himself, which might be madness.

GUIL: If he didn't talk sense, which he does.

ROS: Which suggests the opposite.

PLAYER: Of what?

Small pause.

GUIL: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.

ROS: Or just as mad.

GUIL: Or just as mad.

ROS: And he does both.

GUIL: So there you are.

ROS: Stark raving sane.

Pause.

PLAYER: Why?

GUIL: Ah. ( TO ROS : ) Why?

ROS: Exactly.

GUIL: Exactly what?

ROS: Exactly why.

GUIL: Exactly why what?

ROS: What?

GUIL: Why?

ROS: Why what, exactly?

GUIL: Why is he mad?!