The issues of meta-narrative structure in tom Stoppard’s play and film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead

Tom Stoppard’s play and film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are analyzed in the article as metatexts at different levels of their semiotical and narratological structure. The specificity of dealing with dramaturgical praetextae of a film reinterpreted through a different semiotic system, in which sound, montage (film editing), frames and frame boundaries are significant, is presented. Particular attention is paid both to the theoretical grounding of “metacinema” as a genre and to the film analysis from the indicated viewpoint. The authors identify the manner in which both the play and the film reveal the core issue of the relationship between life and art, as well as provide their own analysis of the principles of interaction between the author, the text, and the reader. It is pointed out in the conclusions that the “text” of the cinema is structured as a complex cinematic game enjoying a multitude of semantic “layers.” Numerous oppositions — such as fictional world vs. real world, traditionalism vs. the non-classical paradigm of aesthetics, etc. — together with the use of “a-text-within-a-text” technique, allow to have the boundaries between theatre and cinematography outlined.