Another Playwright Turns Director

Tom Stoppard, whose first great success on the stage was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is about to follow in the footsteps of David Mamet. These days, for some of our leading playwrights, the play's not necessarily the thing.

Both writers are cherished for their exceptional gift for dialogue. Stoppard's lines have a boundless fascination with the play of words and Mamet's forte is an unrivaled ear for American slang. Both were the authors of screenplays for major Hollywood productions last year. Mamet wrote the script for Brian De Palma's The Untouchables and Steven Spielberg recruited Stoppard to adapt J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun. Then Mamet made his directing debut with House of Games, one of the most original movies released last year.

For his directing bow, Stoppard is turning to material that has been a repertory staple since it hit the London stage in 1967. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his elegant exercise in philosophical comedy and linguistic pyrotechnics, will be filmed in England. The piece centers on three relatively peripheral figures in Hamlet, the two courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the Player King who brings his roving troupe to Elsinore. The casting is bound to generate much interest. Jeremy Irons and Robert Lindsay will play the courtiers and Sean Connery the Player King.

HUNGRY FOR MORE. Bernardo Bertolucci is the heavy favorite to win the best- director Oscar next month. His work in The Last Emperor won the Directors Guild of America best-director award, which is nearly always a strong indicator of how the Academy Award voting will go. Now, it seems, the movie will do as much for China as it has for Bertolucci.

Bertolucci's epic, filmed on location in the Forbidden City and with scenery, support services, food and extras supplied by the Chinese, was made for $22 million. The director, whose career has been gratifyingly revived by The Last Emperor, says the cost of filming it anywhere else would have been inconceivably high. Two other major productions - Empire of the Sun and The Norman Bethune Story - also were filmed on location in China.