Who wrote the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?

Tom Stoppard, in 1966, and the conceit is to take two minor characters from Hamlet - so minor that Shakespeare barely distinguishes them and the King of Denmark mixes up their names - and give them the stage while the famous play happens offstage and occasionally blunders through.

The result is Hamlet from the point of view of people who cannot follow the plot. They are summoned for reasons nobody explains, carry a letter they have not read ordering their own deaths, and spend the interval flipping a coin that comes up heads more than ninety times running. They have no agency and cannot work out what is happening, and the title is a line from the end of Hamlet reporting their deaths as an afterthought.

Stoppard arrived in Britain as a refugee - born in Czechoslovakia, evacuated ahead of the German occupation, his father killed and his mother remarrying an Englishman whose surname he took. He learned only in his fifties, from a relative who traced him, that all four of his grandparents and three aunts had died in the camps and that he was Jewish - which he had not known, and which he later said reorganised his sense of who he was.