At Design Within Reach, a disarmingly chic furniture store in the Central West End, you can buy an ottoman or a pillow in a distinctive patterned fabric called "Letters." The pattern is exactly that: an alphabet broken up to look legible. But you can't read it; the pattern doesn't form words. It's simply a design.
Tom Stoppard created the theatrical version of that fabric years ago, in an intriguing riff on Shakespeare and the spoken word called "Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth." Brainy, a bit arch and often very funny, the two-part play in onstage at Shakespeare St. Louis under the crisp direction of Doug Finlayson and Jef Awada.
In a way, it's more like three plays. In the first part, children and teachers at a fancy school speak to each other in a made-up language, Dogg. You know the words — they're English words — but they are rearranged in what seems to be nonsense fashion. Gradually, though, you realize that you can follow what they're saying.
Sometimes a physical gesture explains everything. For example, "very true" must mean "pass the salt," because the action follows the remark.
It's pretty funny to
hear the actors spouting nonsense, especially when two
ladylike teachers deliver warm, congratulatory remarks
with a loathsome vocabulary that obviously means
something else. People who like word games — including
theatrical word games such as "The Universal Language"
by David Ives and "Fuddy Meers" by David Lindsay-Abaire
— should get a big kick out of this.
Then the students and teachers perform extremely
abbreviated versions of "Hamlet" — first a short form,
then an ultra-short form. Fans of the Reduced
Shakespeare Company and of St. Louis Shakespeare's loony
Magic Smoking Monkey performances will be right at home.
After intermission, things take a serious turn. "Cahoot's
Macbeth" gives us a production of "Macbeth" under an
extremely repressive government. (It was inspired by
real events in Czechoslovakia — the country that
Stoppard, as a child, fled with his family to escape the
Nazis, and where he later had friends who suffered under
Communist rule.)
No longer able to work at their craft, the actors
perform in a living room. They draw a sympathetic
audience and the unwelcome attention of the authorities.
The play commences in English but gradually switches
into — you guessed it — Dogg. We can follow it anyhow.
The glue that holds this all together is a laborer (the
engaging Phillip Bozich), out of his element both at the
tony school and at the living-room play. His Cockney
English isolates him at the school, his fluent Dogg at
the living-room show.
"You don't learn Dogg," one character observes. "You
catch it." That's one theory of language development,
and our intellectually nimble playwright offers up a
number of intriguing theories here.
Does language mean anything? Apparently not — look at
Dogg. Of course it does, with potential real-world
consequences — look at the actors risking everything for
"Macbeth."
Or does authentic meaning ultimately transcend language?
When Macbeth, well-played by John Wolbers, mournfully
evokes "Dominoes and dominoes and dominoes" (or
something like that), we know just what he means.
It's a lot to think about, and a lot to laugh about as
well.
Dogg's Day Afternoon
By Dennis Brown
Riverfront Times - August 15, 2007
Throughout his long and fecund career, British playwright Tom Stoppard has never been at a loss for words. In Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, two short plays from the 1970s that are currently being offered by St. Louis Shakespeare, Stoppard's very theme is words. The opener, Dogg's Hamlet, is little more than an extended sketch that indulges itself in the playfulness of vocabulary; the second one-act, Cahoot's Macbeth, considers the subversive force and seditious power of the spoken word.
Dogg's Hamlet is yet another piece (not all that dissimilar from Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange) in which an author feels compelled to create his own vocabulary. Perhaps it's mere jingoism on my part, but I don't understand why writers like Stoppard and Burgess, whose command of English is majestical, are the same writers who feel compelled to use language to befuddle their audiences. At the very least, it smacks of a cynical elitism. Nevertheless, once again we find ourselves as intruders in a world where words as we define them count for next to nothing. As several prep school students begin to spout their gibberish about breakfasts (that have naught to do with eating) and bicycles (without wheels), the spectator has to choose between waiting out the confusion or going along for the proverbial ride.
Yet it's a highly enjoyable ride, buoyed by the antic disposition that marks Hamlet's feigned madness. We are treated to appealingly goofy sight gags galore, farce straight from Laurel and Hardy, kazoos and Offenbach. Eventually it comes time for the students to stage a truncated production of Hamlet. Have you ever had trouble following Shakespeare? If so, this is the show for you — because after twenty minutes of gobbledygook, when the actors finally begin their "greatest lines" rendition of Hamlet, the text is not only clear, it's embraceable. Shakespeare becomes our lifeline to security, which might well be the simple point that Stoppard is trying to convey.
As directed by Doug Finlayson and Jef Awada, ten rambunctious actors (who are kept so busy that they actually feel like a lot fewer than that) run, skip and just generally flow through the 45 minutes. Then there is Phillip Bozich, who plays a befuddled outsider to the school (he's the character who links the two plays). Bozich is affectionately reminiscent of movie comedian Billy Gilbert, who enjoyed a career (Field Marshal Herring in Chaplin's The Great Dictator, the determined emissary in His Girl Friday) of making dumb endearing.
Cahoot's Macbeth is something else altogether. At the outset, actors are performing a modest living-room version of the Scottish play; the living room, we soon discover, is in an unidentified totalitarian country. We know that Stoppard was prompted to write this script after witnessing the oppression that settled over Czechoslovakia after the failed attempt by Alexander Dubcek and other reformers to liberalize Communism in the late 1960s. But the precise locale of Cahoot's Macbeth is secondary; it might be occurring wherever "normalization" has been imposed on artists, wherever the State views its citizenry as nonpersons.
The schism between the artist and authority is always a matter of profound concern. Shakespeare himself dealt with this issue in Twelfth Night, when he pitted the life-loving Sir Toby Belch against the humorless Malvolio. Because Malvolio loathes what he cannot understand, his ominous presence threatens Sir Toby's very existence. Shakespeare knew whereof he wrote: 60 years after the premiere of Twelfth Night, the puritanical Oliver Cromwell closed the theaters in London. We can only assume that for the next several years, Shakespeare was performed in living rooms.