Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth
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Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth are two plays by Tom Stoppard, written to be performed together. This was not the first time that Stoppard had made use of Shakespearian texts in his own plays or even the first time he had used Hamlet although the context is far different from that of his earlier Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
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[edit] Dogg's Hamlet
In Dogg's Hamlet we find the actors speaking a language called Dogg, which consists of ordinary English words but with meanings completely different from the ones we assign them. Three schoolchildren are rehearsing a performance of Hamlet in English, which is to them a foreign language. Dogg's Hamlet was initially inspired by a scenario proposed by philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein in his work Philosophical Investigations. In this scenario, which plays out in the play, a worker builds a platform using differently shaped pieces of wood. As the worker calls "plank!" "slab!" "block!" "cube!" the appropriatly shaped pieces of wood are tossed over by a co-worker. An observer might assume that the words name the objects, but Wittenstein suggests another interpretation: that the co-worker already knows what pieces to toss and in what order, but that the words are rather signals that the first worker is ready for the next piece. Wittgenstein also suggests a scenario in which one worker understands the words to mean the shapes of the wood and the other understands the words as the signification of readiness, in other words: The two workers speak different languages without being aware of this fact.
The performance of "Hamlet" is a highly edited version that was performed as The Dogg's Troupe 15 Minute Hamlet.
[edit] Cahoot's Macbeth
Cahoot's Macbeth is usually performed with Dogg's Hamlet, and shows a shortened performance of Macbeth carried out under the eyes of a secret police officer who suspects the actors of subversion against the state. The piece is dedicated to the playwright Pavel Kohout whom Stoppard had met in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1977. Because Kohout and some fellow actors had been barred from working in the theatre by the communist government due to their involvement with Charter 77, he had developed an adaption of Macbeth to be performed in living rooms.
[edit] Links between the two plays
The character of "Easy" appears in both plays. He arrives in Dogg's Hamlet to deliver the planks, slabs, blocks, and cubes necessary to build the platform and unlike the other characters speaks in what is recognizably a 20th century working class English dialect, however, when he appears in the living room audience in Cahoot's Macbeth he speaks in the language of Dogg.
[edit] External links
- Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth at The Internet Broadway Database
- Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth at the Internet Movie Database
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| The Plays of Tom Stoppard |
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| 15-Minute Hamlet, After Magritte, Arcadia, Cahoot's Macbeth, The Coast of Utopia, Dalliance, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, Dogg's Hamlet, Enter a Free Man, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Hapgood, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, Jumpers, Night and Day, On the Razzle, Professional Foul, The Real Inspector Hound, The Real Thing, Rock 'n' Roll, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Rough Crossing, Travesties, Undiscovered Country |
