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The comma that divides Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth serves both to separate them and to show their relationship. One could not exist without the other and together they form a piece of theatre that makes a statement greater than the sum of its parts.
Beginning with a language-game from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Stoppard discards our familiar English in favour of ‘Dogg’, a language that is caught more than learned. From there we attack Shakespeare’s classic Hamlet with irreverence, language and actors thrown about the stage with reckless abandon.
Cahoot’s Macbeth was written as a tribute to Pavel Kohout, banned theatre maker and dissident in 1970s Soviet Czechoslovakia. An early example of Stoppard’s life-long advocacy for human rights, Cahoot’s Macbeth takes our language-game into dangerous territory, daring to defy authority and showing how language can be used to oppress or to liberate, depending on who’s in control.
“Hilarious…cuts Shakespeare to the quick” (The New York Times)
“With his sense of the absurd and his inspired understanding of Shakespeare, (Stoppard) shares a sense of how theatre – being made fun of – might be the thing an authoritarian regime was most afraid of” (The Guardian)
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