Word: kohout
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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CAHOOT'S MACBETH also has its clever moments. Stoppard wrote the play under the direction of Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout, who experienced the decade of "normalization" following the fall of the Dubcek government in his country. During this period, the government prevented many people, including actors, from pursuing their careers. This repression provides the context for the second play...
...Kohout ironically places Wolf within an anti-Nazi resistance group while a high school teacher in a small Czech town. Called into the office of the local Commandandt, Wolf is easily intimidated and betrays the other members of the group, including his own brother. From them on, everything is easy for the executioner: he must hold no allegiance but to the state, have no love but for the state, take no orders but from the state. The government in power doesn't matter. The executioner owes his life and soul, not to politics, but to the essence of the state...
...executioner, as the model of modern man, learns to see the beauty of killing with precision, the simplicity of a perfected technique that kills a hanging man within 30 seconds. These are the values by which Kohout's characters live; stripped of their extremes, they do not seem far removed from...
What is intriguing about Kohout's characters is not their present status as executioners, but their past: they are not aberrations or monsters, but the perfect products of their society. And their society...
...until the end of the book do we realize the intricacy of Kohout's style. By leading us with anecdotes and facts about methods of inflicting pain, and by tempting us with the logic of killing, Kohout has made us his characters' accomplices. We find ourselves in the same position as Lizinka's father, who, originally opposed to her planned course of study, at the end accepts Wolf as a future son-in-law. By our interest in Kohout's society and our inactivity in our own, we remove ourselves from our humanity...