Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Stoppard's play takes two minor courtiers from Hamlet and puts them at the centre. It runs alongside Shakespeare's plot, quotes its scenes word for word when they cross it, and ends with the letter that sends them to their deaths in England.

Stoppard acknowledged that Waiting for Godot freed him to write the play: two bewildered men filling time with wordplay and games while waiting for a purpose they cannot see, in the same comic, existential register.