- Tom Stoppard / Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Added 2025-04-24 08:22:10 +0000 UTC“Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security. ”
(A good pause. ROS leaps up and bellows at the audience.)
ROS: Fire!
(GUIL jumps up.)
GUIL: Where?
ROS: It's all right - I'm demonstrating the misuse of free speech. To prove that it exists. (He regards theaudience, that is the direction, with contempt - and other directions, then front again.) Not a move. They shouldburn to death in their shoes.
(ROS takes out one of his coins. Spins it. Catches it. Looks at it. Replaces it.)
GUIL: What was it?
ROS: What?
GUIL: Heads or tails?
ROS: Oh. I didn't look.
GUIL: Yes you did. ROS:
Oh, did I? (He takes a coin, studies it.) Quite right - it rings a bell.
GUIL: What's the last thing you remember?
ROS: I don't wish to be reminded of it.
GUIL: We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
