Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...GETS THE sense that Sheppard, Stoppard, and Beckett are the three pillars of drama at Harvard. As I left the tiny theatre, I was asked what I thought of the three plays which I had just seen. Pausing, I replied "They were definitely Beckett." And keeping that in mind, they were also very well done...
...schoolboys run around under the picky eyes of their teacher in hasty preparation for a performance of Hamlet, in English, which gives Stoppard an opportunity to exploit his linguistic invention...
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...
...catch the attention of the actors who are in the middle of their performance. The only actor who understands Dogg is Cahoot (Wise), who never learned the language, but rather, as he puts it, "caught" it. Eventually the rest of the actors "catch" Dogg and continue Macbeth in Stoppard's language...
Overall, both Stoppard's message and his storyline are not always immediately apparent to the audience. The use of Dogg in both plays, however, results in amusing games with language. Stoppard's clever interplay of regular English with his own newfound dialect, especially in the Inspector's dialogue in Macbeth, makes them inevitably confusing, but well worth the effort...