["Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth"] is the latest prank by Tom Stoppard to reach our shores. Actually, it's two pranks, since it consists of a couple of little plays that the ingenious author has contrived to join loosely together but that have the air of having been surprised into marriage by the universal shotgun known as giving the customers their money's worth…. These plays combine comically abbreviated versions of "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" with the kind of frisky finger exercises in wordplay and logic that are Stoppard's favorite stock-intrade. In a program note, Stoppard mentions that "Dogg's Hamlet" derives from a section of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigation," but don't be frightened; potted Wittgenstein quickly gives way to potted Shakespeare—a "Hamlet" that for pace and violent high spirits resembles nothing so much as a tragic Punch and Judy show….
The second play, dedicated to the Czechoslovakian writer Pavel Kohout, is a version of "Macbeth" as Stoppard imagines it being played in an apartment in Prague. It is a fact that Kohout and some distinguished actor friends of his have assembled a small company, which, on invitation, stages "Macbeth" in people's homes. Stoppard acknowledges that Kohout's extraordinary "living-room theatre" has been his inspiration, but he insists that "Cahoot is not Kohout, and this necessarily over-truncated 'Macbeth' is not supposed to be a fair representation of Kohout's elegant seventy-five-minute version." Being Stoppard, "Cahoot's Macbeth" is an outrageous manipulation of the original play, and it ends by modulating unexpectedly back into Wittgenstein and the question of what words are capable of meaning under differing circumstances. We are amused and instructed, but we leave the theatre feeling somewhat under-nourished: so much fun, so little food for the imagination! The Master Juggler has left us nothing to do but laugh, and that is a welcome but insufficient activity. (p. 147)
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