Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Arcadia

GUIL ( tensed up by this rambling): Do you remember the first thing that happened today?

ROS ( promptly): I woke up, I suppose. ( Triggered. ) Oh---I've got it now---that man, a foreigner, he woke us up.

GUIL: A messenger. ( He relaxes, sits. )

ROS: That's it---pale sky before dawn, a man standing on his saddle to bang on the shutters---

shouts---What's all the row about?! Clear Off!---But then he called our names. You remember that---this man woke us up.

GUIL: Yes.

ROS: We were sent for.

GUIL: Yes.

ROS: That's why we're here. ( He looks round, seems doubtful, then the explanation. ) Travelling.

GUIL: Yes.

ROS ( dramatically): It was urgent---a matter of extreme urgency, a royal summons, his very words: official business and no questions asked---lights in the stable-yard, saddle up and off headlong and hotfoot across the land, our guides outstripped in breakneck pursuit of our duty! Fearful lest we come too late!

Small pause.

GUIL: Too late for what?

ROS: How do I know? We haven't got there yet.

GUIL: Then what are we doing here, I ask myself.

ROS: You might well ask.

GUIL: We better get on.

ROS: You might well think.

GUIL: We better get on.

ROS ( actively): Right! ( Pause. ) On where?

GUIL: Forward.

ROS ( forward to footlights): Ah. ( Hesitates. ) Which way do we---( He turns round. ) Which way did we---?

GUIL: Practically starting from scratch... An awakening, a man standing on his saddle to bang on the shutters, our names shouted in a certain dawn, a message, a summons A new record for heads and tails. We have not been... picked out... simply to be abandoned... set loose to find our own way... We are entitled to some direction... I would have thought.

ROS ( alert, listening): I say---! I say

GUIL: Yes?

ROS: I can hear---I thought I heard---music.

GUIL raises himself.

GUIL: Yes?

ROS: Like a band. ( He looks around, laughs embarrassedly, expiating himself. ) It sounded like--- --a band. Drums.

GUIL: Yes.

ROS ( relaxes): It couldn't have been real.

GUIL: 'The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody' demolish.

ROS ( at edge of stage): It must have been thunder. Like drums... By the end of the next speech, the band is faintly audible.

GUIL: A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear.

That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until---

God,' says a second man, 'I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.' At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience Look, look!' recites the crowd. 'A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.'

ROS ( eagerly): I knew all along it was a band.

GUIL: ( tiredly): He knew all along it was a band.

ROS: Here they come!

GUIL: ( at the last moment before they enter---wistfully): I'm sorry it wasn't a unicorn. It would have been nice to have unicorns.

The TRAGEDIANS are six in number, including a small BOY ( ALFRED ). Two pull and push a cart piled with props and belongings. There is also a DRUMMER, a HORN- PLAYER and a FLUTIST. The SPOKESMAN ('the PLAYER ') has no instrument. He brings up the rear and is the first to notice them. PLAYER : Halt! The group turns and halts. (Joyously.) An audience! ROS and GUIL half rise. Don't move!

They sink back. He regards them fondly. Perfect! A lucky thing we came along.

ROS: For us?

PLAYER: Let us hope so. But to meet two gentlemen on the road---we would not hope to meet them off it.

ROS: No?

PLAYER: Well met, in fact, and just in time.

ROS: Why's that?

PLAYER: Why. we grow rusty and you catch us at the very point of decadence---by this time tomorrow we might have forgotten everything we ever knew. That's a thought, isn't it?

( He laughs generously. ) We'd be back where we started ---improvising.

ROS: Tumblers, are you?

PLAYER: We can give you a tumble if that's your taste, and times being what they are...

Otherwise, for a jingle of coin we can do you a selection of gory romances, full of fine cadence and corpses, pirated from the Italian; and it doesn't take much to make a jingle---even a single coin has music in it. They all flourish and bow, raggedly.

Tragedians, at your command. ROS and GUIL have got to their feet.

ROS: My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz. GUIL Confers briefly with him.

( Without embarrassment. ) I'm sorry---his name's Guildenstern, and I'm Rosencrantz.

PLAYER: A pleasure. We've played to bigger, of course, but quality counts for something. I recognized you at once

ROS: And who are we?

PLAYER: ---as fellow artists.

ROS: I thought we were gentlemen.

PLAYER: For some of us it is performance, for others, patronage. They are two sides of the same coin, or, let us say, being as there are so many of us, the same side of two coins.

( Bows again. ) Don't clap too loudly---it's a very old world.