We doubt whether many of our readers have seen the English writer Tom Stoppard's play Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It is a rather weird play. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. As minor characters, they are not on stage much when Hamlet is being performed, and then only for a short time. Stoppard's plot happens ‘backstage’ of Hamlet. Every now and then, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern have to leave the stage of his play to walk on to the set of Hamlet to play their part there, but we never see them performing in Hamlet. And having been part of the action there, they then ‘exit, stage left’, and walk back into their parts in Stoppard's play about them. And it all gets very clever, because Stoppard links what they do in his play as they come and go to what they were doing when they were offstage in Hamlet's plot. Too clever by half for most people, including Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern – part of the plot being built around their attempts to understand what is happening to them – because you have to know Hamlet well enouugh to realize what they are involved in every time they get called away, and so get a handle on why they are like what they are like when they ‘come back’.