In search of some vintage laughs among the “classic” collections of my favorite streamers, I stumbled back into the great British playwright Tom Stoppard’s lone directing credit, his star-studded big screen adaptation of “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead.”

I saw this when it was in theaters, and I’ve seen it and a couple of Stoppard’s lighter plays (“The Real Inspector Hound” comes to mind) on stage over the years. I love Tim Roth, Gary Oldman and Richard Dreyfuss, and bits of droll dialogue getting at the existential/absurdist point of it all linger in the memory.

“What are you playing at?”

“Words!”

But the funny thing about it now is that, wordplay or not, it’s quite slow, almost cumbersome. Perhaps I’m conflating pleasant memories of it with brisk and bright stage versions I’ve seen, but the 1990 film is not subtle about underscoring why one of our great playwrights and screenwriters (“Shakespeare in Love,” “Brazil,” “Empire of the Sun,” “Enigma,” “The Russia House”) only stepped behind the camera to direct once.

On screen, “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead” is something of a drag. Stoppard could have used an editor who cut the film into something quicker and flashier. “Period detail” is nice, but lingering on shots of our tragicomic heroes in vast Elizabethan ballrooms and “Waiting for Godot” bleak exteriors slows the pace and waters down the wit.

But at least Dreyfuss seems to be having the time of his life, hamming it up and even adding tragi-comic depth to the leader of the troupe of players who figured in the Danish Prince Hamlet’s scheme to unmask his possibly murderous uncle, and who entertains and enlightens the doomed heroes of Stoppard’s career-making 1966 play.

“Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go, when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.”

Stoppard’s timeless conceit was in taking these peripheral figures from “Hamlet” and deconstructing the play, the plot, the themes and the psychology of it all through the eyes of two witty but not clever enough layabouts.

Hell, they can’t quite decide which of them is Rosencrantz (generally speaking, Oldman) and which is Guildenstern (Roth, mainly by default).

We meet them on Samuel Beckett’s existentially empty road, endlessly flipping a gold coin Rosencrantz finds, gambling on the stunning succession of “heads” that turn up and its relation to “the laws of probability,” “the law of diminishing returns” and “the redistribution of wealth.”

They have received a royal “summons,” and are making their way to Elsinore to meet with newly-crowned King Claudius (Donald Sumpter) and newly-married to Queen Gertrude (Joanna Miles), a wedding which has driven Hamlet (Iain Glen), her son by the newly-dead former king, mad.

Stumbling across a band of “tragedians,” our duo is subjected to a lot of banter of the “love, blood and rhetoric” in the hopes that they’ll pay for a performance — or a sexual dalliance, for pay — with a member of the single-sex cast.

Would they like to see “The Rape of the Sabine Women…or woman, or rather ‘Albert?‘”

Slipping away, they arrive at Elisnore and are given their charge by the king — renew their old friendship with the prince, find out what’s eating at him and let Claudius know what he’s planning.

Stoppard masterfully weaves this script into the Shakespeare play, with its scant Rosencrantz & Guildenstern scenes and their lone scene with Ophelia’s father, the faintly doddering Polonius (Ian Richardson). They watch the touring theatre troupe’s direction (by Hamlet) in their production of “The Murder of Gonzago,” transformed by Hamlet to play up what he suspects Claudius and his mother did to his father. And they’re even unwitting participants in the way Polonius meets his end.

The film may have a somewht lumbering quality, with even the smooth transitions feeling drawn-out. But the back-engineering of the play is brilliant, and forshadows Stoppard’s similarly clever touches in “Shakespeare in Love.”

And that wordplay tickles in every incarnation of this show.

“I think I have it! A man talking to himself is no matter than a man talking nonsense not to himself.”

“Or just as mad.”

“OR just as mad.”

“And he does both.“

“So there you are.”

“Stark raving sane.“

Oldman gives Rosencrantz depth beyond the befuddlement that seems his main character trait when first we meet him. And Roth quickly disabuses us of the notion that Guildenstern is the cagier, the more paranoid, “the smart one.”

And Dreyfuss, finishing up his peak years of stardom, leans into the theatricality of it all, and what grated in excessive performances such as his Oscar-bait turn in “Whose Life Is it Anyway?” is indulged to a delightful degree. He gets to sum up acting, Shakespeare and the theater’s obligations to audience expectations and whatever contrivances cooked up by the writer, reminding us “the play’s the thing.”

“We are tragedians, you see? We follow directions. There is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.”

The generations of horror stories writers tell of what a director, a studio or “Hollywood” did to one’s script explains Stoppard’s determination to get the play that made him on the screen the way he wanted it. But one cannot help but wonder if another set of eyes and ears — or two other sets — might have juiced the supporting cast, freshened the line readings (which can be perfunctory), tightened the transitions and given the players that most hated of stage and screen directions actors, but one which would have given this more pace, urgency and life.

“OK, let’s try that again. But FASTER.”

Rating: PG, bare bottoms, hither and yon

Cast: Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, Iain Glen, Joanna Roth, Ian Richardson, Donald Sumpter, Joanna Miles and Richard Dreyfuss

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tom Stoppard, based on his play. An MGM release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:57