| PREFACE
The comma that divides Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth also serves to unite two plays which have common elements: the first is hardly a play at all without the second, which cannot be performed without the first.
Dogg's Hamlet is a conflation of two pieces written for Ed Berman and Inter-Action; namely Dogg's Our Pet, which opened the Almost Free Theatre in Soho in December 1971, and The Dogg's Troupe 15-Minute Hamlet, which was written (or rather edited) for performance on a double-decker bus.
Dogg's Hamlet derives from a section of Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations. Consider the following scene: A man is building a platform using pieces of wood of different shapes and sizes. These are thrown to him by a second man, one at a time, as they are called for. An observer notes that each time the first man shouts 'Plank!' he is thrown a long flat piece. Then he calls 'Slab!' and is thrown a piece of a different shape. This happens a few times. There is a call for 'Block!' and a third shape is thrown. Finally a call for 'Cube!' produces a fourth type of piece. An observer would probably conclude that the different words described different shapes and sizes of the material. But this is not the only possible interpretation. Suppose, for example, the thrower knows in advance which pieces the builder needs, and in what order. In such a case there would be no need for the builder to name the pieces he requires but only to indicate when he is ready for the next one. So the calls might translate thus:
Plank = Ready Block = Next
Slab = Okay Cube = Thank you
In such a case, the observer would have made a false assumption, but the fact that he on the one hand and the builders on the other are using two different languages need not be apparent to either party. Moreover, it would also be possible that the two builders do not share a language either; and if life for them consisted only of building platforms in this manner there would be no reason for them to discover that each was using a language unknown to the other. This happy state of affairs would of course continue only as long as, through sheer coincidence, each man's utterance made sense (even if not the same sense) to the other.
The appeal to me consisted in the possibility of writing a play which had to teach the audience the language the play was written in. The present text is a modest attempt to do this: I think one might have gone much further.
Cahoot's Macbeth is dedicated to the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout. During the last decade of 'normalization' which followed the fall of Dubcek, thousands of Czechoslovaks were prevented from pursuing their careers. Among them are many writers and actors.
During a short visit to Prague in 1977 I met Kohout and Pavel Landovsky, a well-known actor who had been banned from working for years since falling foul of the authorities. (lt was Landovsky who was driving the car on the fateful day in January 1977 when the police stopped him and his friends and seized the first known copies of the document that became know as Charter 77.) One evening Landovsky took me backstage at one ot the theatres where he had done some of his best work. A performance was going on at the time and his sense of fierce frustration is difficult to describe.
A year later Kohout wrote to me: „As you know, many Czech theatre-people are not allowed to work in the theatre during the last years. As one of them who cannot live without theatre I was searching for a possibility to do theatre in spite of circumstances. Now I am glad to tell you that in a few days, after eight weeks rehearsals - a Living-Room Theatre is opening, with nothing smaller but Macbeth.
„What is LRT? A call-group. Everybody, who wants to have Macbeth at home with two great and forbidden Czech actors, Pavel Landovsky and Vlasta Chramostova, can invite his friends and call us. Five people will come with one suitcase.
"Pavel Landovsky and Vlasta Chramostova are starring Macbeth and Lady, a well known and forbidden young singer Vlastimil Tresnak is singing Malcolm and making music, one young girl, who couldn't study the theatre-school, Tereza Kohoutova, by chance my daughter, is playing little parts and reading remarks; and the last man, that's me...! is reading and a little bit playing the rest of the roles, on behalf of his great colleague.
"I think, he wouldn't be worried about it, it functions and promises to be not only a solution of our situation but also an interesting theatre event. I adapted the play, of course, but I am sure it is nevertheless Macbeth !"
The letter was written in June, and in August there was a postscript: "Macbeth is now performed in Prague flats."
Cahoot's Macbeth was inspired by these events. However, Cahoot is not Kohout, and his necessarily over-truncated Macbeth is not supposed to be a fair representation of Kohout’s elegant seventy-five minute version.
TOM STOPPARD
August 1980
About the play(s)
Like Stoppard's most famous play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth is a masterpiece of intellectual wordplay built on Shakespearean foundations. The two plays are divided by a comma but united by common themes: the mutability of language and the employment of Shakespeare.
Wittgenstein's philosophical musings on the acquisition of language provided Stoppard with the inspiration for Dogg's Hamlet. In this play, Stoppard confronts the audience with three schoolchildren speaking a language called "Dogg", in which familiar words and phrases are given entirely new meanings (for instance, "useless, git" now means "Good day, Sir"). The children are preparing to present a school production of Shakespeare's Hamlet in English - which to them is a foreign language. Even the officious school headmaster cannot control the uproariously funny confusions of word and meaning which result when Easy, a deliveryman who speaks only English, joins the scene. By the time the school's hilariously abbreviated performance of Hamlet screeches to a halt, Stoppard has succeeded in teaching the audience to understand more clearly both "Dogg" and the frailty of our interpretations of words. In addition, the Shakespeare play is part of an oppressive system and is used as a cultural institution in the service of authority.
Cahoot's Macbeth also explores sinister forms of verbal manipulation. In this story of artists struggling for free expression behind the Iron Curtain, the twisting of words is not a source of amusement but, on the one hand, a tool of oppression (used by the inspector) and, on the other, a tool of subversiveness (used by the actors). Stoppard wrote Cahoot's Macbeth in honor of the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout, who, along with many other artists, was banned from practicing his craft after the crushing of the Prague Spring. In defiance of the ban, Kohout formed the "Living-Room Theatre" troupe, which included the famous Czech actors Pavel Landovsky and Vlasta Chramostova. This group of blacklisted theatre artists worked as street-sweepers and waitresses by day, and performed plays secretly, in friends' homes, at night.
Once such home performance - an abridgement of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth - takes place in Cahoot's Macbeth. Unlike the absurdly frantic Hamlet, this reduced Macbeth is a stark and moving play, a metaphor for the communist takeover. The performance is interrupted by the arrival of an Inspector of the Secret Police, investigating the players for "acting out of hostility to the state." With the Inspector's presence adding danger to every word, the performance of Macbeth continues and the tension builds - until Easy appears again, this time speaking "Dogg". Through this collision of worlds and words, Stoppard redeems language from the Inspector's twisted metaphors; the tool of oppression is transformed into a means of liberation.
The Play
| PREFACE
The comma that divides Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth also serves to unite two plays which have common elements: the first is hardly a play at all without the second, which cannot be performed without the first.
Dogg's Hamlet is a conflation of two pieces written for Ed Berman and Inter-Action; namely Dogg's Our Pet, which opened the Almost Free Theatre in Soho in December 1971, and The Dogg's Troupe 15-Minute Hamlet, which was written (or rather edited) for performance on a double-decker bus.
Dogg's Hamlet derives from a section of Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations. Consider the following scene: A man is building a platform using pieces of wood of different shapes and sizes. These are thrown to him by a second man, one at a time, as they are called for. An observer notes that each time the first man shouts 'Plank!' he is thrown a long flat piece. Then he calls 'Slab!' and is thrown a piece of a different shape. This happens a few times. There is a call for 'Block!' and a third shape is thrown. Finally a call for 'Cube!' produces a fourth type of piece. An observer would probably conclude that the different words described different shapes and sizes of the material. But this is not the only possible interpretation. Suppose, for example, the thrower knows in advance which pieces the builder needs, and in what order. In such a case there would be no need for the builder to name the pieces he requires but only to indicate when he is ready for the next one. So the calls might translate thus:
Plank = Ready Block = Next
Slab = Okay Cube = Thank you
In such a case, the observer would have made a false assumption, but the fact that he on the one hand and the builders on the other are using two different languages need not be apparent to either party. Moreover, it would also be possible that the two builders do not share a language either; and if life for them consisted only of building platforms in this manner there would be no reason for them to discover that each was using a language unknown to the other. This happy state of affairs would of course continue only as long as, through sheer coincidence, each man's utterance made sense (even if not the same sense) to the other.
The appeal to me consisted in the possibility of writing a play which had to teach the audience the language the play was written in. The present text is a modest attempt to do this: I think one might have gone much further.
Cahoot's Macbeth is dedicated to the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout. During the last decade of 'normalization' which followed the fall of Dubcek, thousands of Czechoslovaks were prevented from pursuing their careers. Among them are many writers and actors.
During a short visit to Prague in 1977 I met Kohout and Pavel Landovsky, a well-known actor who had been banned from working for years since falling foul of the authorities. (lt was Landovsky who was driving the car on the fateful day in January 1977 when the police stopped him and his friends and seized the first known copies of the document that became know as Charter 77.) One evening Landovsky took me backstage at one ot the theatres where he had done some of his best work. A performance was going on at the time and his sense of fierce frustration is difficult to describe.
A year later Kohout wrote to me: „As you know, many Czech theatre-people are not allowed to work in the theatre during the last years. As one of them who cannot live without theatre I was searching for a possibility to do theatre in spite of circumstances. Now I am glad to tell you that in a few days, after eight weeks rehearsals - a Living-Room Theatre is opening, with nothing smaller but Macbeth.
„What is LRT? A call-group. Everybody, who wants to have Macbeth at home with two great and forbidden Czech actors, Pavel Landovsky and Vlasta Chramostova, can invite his friends and call us. Five people will come with one suitcase.
"Pavel Landovsky and Vlasta Chramostova are starring Macbeth and Lady, a well known and forbidden young singer Vlastimil Tresnak is singing Malcolm and making music, one young girl, who couldn't study the theatre-school, Tereza Kohoutova, by chance my daughter, is playing little parts and reading remarks; and the last man, that's me...! is reading and a little bit playing the rest of the roles, on behalf of his great colleague.
"I think, he wouldn't be worried about it, it functions and promises to be not only a solution of our situation but also an interesting theatre event. I adapted the play, of course, but I am sure it is nevertheless Macbeth !"
The letter was written in June, and in August there was a postscript: "Macbeth is now performed in Prague flats."
Cahoot's Macbeth was inspired by these events. However, Cahoot is not Kohout, and his necessarily over-truncated Macbeth is not supposed to be a fair representation of Kohout’s elegant seventy-five minute version.
TOM STOPPARD
August 1980
About the play(s)
Like Stoppard's most famous play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth is a masterpiece of intellectual wordplay built on Shakespearean foundations. The two plays are divided by a comma but united by common themes: the mutability of language and the employment of Shakespeare.
Wittgenstein's philosophical musings on the acquisition of language provided Stoppard with the inspiration for Dogg's Hamlet. In this play, Stoppard confronts the audience with three schoolchildren speaking a language called "Dogg", in which familiar words and phrases are given entirely new meanings (for instance, "useless, git" now means "Good day, Sir"). The children are preparing to present a school production of Shakespeare's Hamlet in English - which to them is a foreign language. Even the officious school headmaster cannot control the uproariously funny confusions of word and meaning which result when Easy, a deliveryman who speaks only English, joins the scene. By the time the school's hilariously abbreviated performance of Hamlet screeches to a halt, Stoppard has succeeded in teaching the audience to understand more clearly both "Dogg" and the frailty of our interpretations of words. In addition, the Shakespeare play is part of an oppressive system and is used as a cultural institution in the service of authority.
Cahoot's Macbeth also explores sinister forms of verbal manipulation. In this story of artists struggling for free expression behind the Iron Curtain, the twisting of words is not a source of amusement but, on the one hand, a tool of oppression (used by the inspector) and, on the other, a tool of subversiveness (used by the actors). Stoppard wrote Cahoot's Macbeth in honor of the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout, who, along with many other artists, was banned from practicing his craft after the crushing of the Prague Spring. In defiance of the ban, Kohout formed the "Living-Room Theatre" troupe, which included the famous Czech actors Pavel Landovsky and Vlasta Chramostova. This group of blacklisted theatre artists worked as street-sweepers and waitresses by day, and performed plays secretly, in friends' homes, at night.
Once such home performance - an abridgement of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth - takes place in Cahoot's Macbeth. Unlike the absurdly frantic Hamlet, this reduced Macbeth is a stark and moving play, a metaphor for the communist takeover. The performance is interrupted by the arrival of an Inspector of the Secret Police, investigating the players for "acting out of hostility to the state." With the Inspector's presence adding danger to every word, the performance of Macbeth continues and the tension builds - until Easy appears again, this time speaking "Dogg". Through this collision of worlds and words, Stoppard redeems language from the Inspector's twisted metaphors; the tool of oppression is transformed into a means of liberation.
The Author
| Sir Tom Stoppard ranks highly amongst living playwrights. At 61 he shows no sign of decline, producing a new play for the theatre every few years, and a trickle of top quality screenplays for cinema and television, plus radio plays in between. From Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead (1965) to The Invention of Love (1997) he has dazzled and entertained theatre audiences across the world. Now cinema audiences are enjoying the fruits of his talent in the movie Shakespeare in Love, for which he received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1999.
Thomas Stoppard was originially born bearing the family name of Straussler. At that time, his family resided in Zlin (now Gottwaldov), Czechoslovakia. Just two years later the family fled to Singapore. Before the Japanese invasion in 1942 the familiy was evacuated to India. Stoppard’s father, who had to stay behind, was killed. In 1946 Mrs. Straussler married Officer Kenneth Stoppard, a soldier in the British army. The family moved to England in the same year and Tom started school in Nottinghamshire. After completing his preliminary education, he went on to devote the next six years to being a full-time journalist, reporting on film and theatre. Between 1960 and 1964, Stoppard gave up his reporting job to pursue his writing.
His first endeavor was a stage play, A Walk on the Water. Additionally, he worked as a drama critic for "Scene“ magazine, sold three short stories to Faber and Faber, earned a commission for a novel, had two fifteen-minute radio plays, The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and 'M' is for Moon, Among Other Things (produced by the BBC), wrote episodes for television series, and wrote the first draft of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In 1965, Stoppard gained his first recognition as a writer when the Royal Shakespeare Company took an option on a revised version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
During this same year, he also completed the radio plays Albert's Bridge and Artist Descending a Staircase. Stoppard's popularity grew in 1966 when the BBC broadcast his one-act radio play, If You're Glad, I'll Be Frank, and his novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon was published. 1967 brought international acclaim for Stoppard when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern debuted at the Old Vic. Just one year later, his first play, A Walk on the Water, finally reached the stage in a revised version, titled Enter a Free Man.
This was followed by many witty and inventive plays, including The Real Inspector Hound (1968, a play-within-a-play which parodies the conventions of the stage thriller); Jumpers (1972); Travesties (1974); Dirty Linen (1976, a satire of political life and parliamentary misdemeanors); Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977, about a political dissident in a Soviet psychiatric hospital); Night and Day (1978, about the dangers of the "closed shop“ in journalism); and The Real Thing (1982, a marital tragi-comedy). Stoppard has also written many works for film, radio, and television.
In the last thirty years, Tom Stoppard's career has continued to grow in popularity. To date, he has written 22 books, 41 plays (many of which are simply his books coming to life on the stage), and six screenplays. In recognition of his work, he has been honored with nine different awards.
Tom Stoppard has been married twice, once in 1965 and again in 1971. His first marriage was to Jose Ingle, which lasted six years. Stoppard fathered two sons with Jose. In 1971, the marriage was dissolved, and within the same year, Stoppard met and wed Dr. Miriam Moore-Robinson. The two also have two sons.
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