MOVIE REVIEW : No Holds Bard : Director Tom Stoppard gives Shakespeare’s cameo players license to play in the delightful ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.’

Rosencrantz is a charming chap, if a little slow, with stringy pageboy locks and an ineffably sweet disposition. Guildenstern is thinner, sallower, more cynical: a glowering punk with a clever, shallow rat’s-eye view of life. Hazily familiar to us as two cameo players--the treacherous schoolfellows of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”--they were moved to center stage in Tom Stoppard’s most famous play, “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” which writer-director Stoppard has now turned into a film both eloquently impish and brilliant.

“Rosencrantz” (Beverly Center Cineplex, AMC Century 14) is a jewel of a movie, a work of high literacy, bawdy good spirits, blazing wit, bizarre charm and eerie suspense. Theatricality is a word often used pejoratively for filmed plays, but Stoppard’s film is theatrical in the best sense. It makes all its world a stage, awakens our delight in sheer illusion.

In the film, Stoppard’s duo, played to rare perfection by blithe Gary Oldman (Rosencrantz) and icily glum Tim Roth (Guildenstern) have been mysteriously summoned to Elsinore, where the new king, Claudius, has engaged them to spy on his melancholy nephew and nemesis, Hamlet (Iain Glenn).

Soon up to their ears in sudden deaths, remembered sins and nymphs, they’re also hectored by the threadbare, eternally ebullient Player King or Player--an equally splendid performance by Richard Dreyfuss, who has never been defter, subtler or more murderously articulate. This Player, a shameless mountebank whom Guildenstern angrily describes as a “comic pornographer” with “a rabble of prostitutes,” stages shows that eerily prefigure everyone’s fate; including a mini-adaptation of “Hamlet” (“A slaughterhouse!”) itself.

While they wait, R. and G. play with the only tools they possess. “Words . . . They’re all we have to go on,” Guildenstern remarks early on, and they proceed to verbalize, soliloquize, pun, alliterize and cross-question each other to death, at one point playing a verbal tennis match in which the goal is to keep asking questions while forcing your opponent into direct statements. Throughout, they’re trapped in a cul-de-sac, a time out of joint, symbolized by the curious appearance on Elsinore’s mountain trail of a golden coin that comes up heads on 156 successive tosses.

Stoppard’s play is a burlesque; what goes on between his befuddled pair is less an extrapolation of offstage doings in “Hamlet” than a deliberate anachronism. In a way, what we’re watching are not the “real” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but two unknown and utterly confused travelers--they can’t keep their own names straight and neither can anyone else--who have somehow dropped into a mock-Kafkaesque nightmare that has assumed the outer form of Shakespeare’s play. What happens to them is a bit like the recurring actor’s dream where you’re trapped in a play without knowing your lines--except that, here, they’re trapped in their lines without knowing the play.

And, even while the play repeatedly breaks in--with its luscious flights of poetry and passion and its bejeweled imagery--R. and G. converse among themselves in a drier, more self-conscious idiom that owes much to the meta-theatrical traditions of the mid-20th Century. First written in 1966, when the Czech-born Stoppard was 29, “Rosencrantz” reflects an era when all kinds of obsessively reflexive formal experiments--plays about plays, novels about “the novel” and paintings whose deepest subject was paint--were all the rage.

Samuel Beckett and “Waiting for Godot” lie behind Stoppard’s Shakespearean wags. So perhaps, do Ionesco, Pirandello, Brecht. But so, too, do Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, Keaton and Britain’s “The Goon Show.” This film is likely to prompt bewildered walkouts, or dismissals by some as pretentiously obscure. But it’s actually a playful work: deeply playful.

Other novelists and playwrights have occasionally become film directors--including Andre Malraux (“Man’s Hope”), Curzio Malaparte (“Cristo Proibito”) and, more recently, David Mamet and Norman Mailer. Of them all, perhaps only Jean Cocteau showed more flair for the movies than Stoppard.

He’s no neophyte--Stoppard’s own screenwriting credits include “Empire of the Sun,” “Brazil,” “The Russia House” and Losey’s “Romantic Englishwoman”--but his flair for casting, performance, the lovely visuals he gets from designer Vaughn Edwards and cinematographer Peter Biziou (Alan Parker’s regular collaborator), his delight in the cool, crisp Yugoslavian landscapes all go beyond dilettantism. At 53, he may be Britain’s most promising new filmmaker.

To give “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” (MPAA rated PG, despite suggestive dialogue) its due, it is probably one of the best film adaptations of an English-language play ever made. A surprise Grand Prize winner at the last Venice Film Festival, it works, paradoxically, because of Stoppard’s irreverence. Instead of cracking the whip over his own words--and how many words are better?--he’s used the play as a springboard: cutting, extending and compressing at will, adding dollops of action, gobs of slapstick, montages and delicious trickery, and obviously giving his wonderful cast, especially Oldman and Roth, license to play with their parts.

They all respond, gloriously. And, in so doing, they strike a blow for all actors and people shoved off to the wings, away from the light, trapped offstage in absurd monotony, while the grand drama of life transpires somewhere else, out of view. Long live Rosencrantz! (Or is it Guildenstern?) Long live Guildenstern--or whoever he is! And long live life’s absurdities, art’s beauty, Stoppard’s words and all the mysteries of love, drama, blood and rhetoric.

‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead’

Gary Oldman: Rosencrantz

Tim Roth: Guildenstern

Richard Dreyfuss: The Player

Iain Glen: Hamlet

A Cinecom Entertainment presentation of a Michael Brandman & Emmanuel Azenberg production, in association with Thirteen WNET. Director/Screenplay Tom Stoppard. Producers Michael Brandman, Emmanuel Azenberg. Executive producers Louise Stephens, Thomas J. Rizzo. Cinematographer Peter Biziou. Editor Nicholas Gaster. Costumes Andreane Neofitou. Music Stanley Myers. Production design Vaughan Edwards. Art director Ivo Husnjak. Sound Louis Kramer. With Joanna Miles, Donald Sumpter, Joanna Roth, Ian Richardson. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG (Suggestive dialogue).