Word: stoppard
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...both plays, Stoppard's Dogg-speaking characters confront English speakers. These entertaining encounters owe much of their appeal, however, to the cast's versatility under the clever direction of Fred Pletcher...
INFLUENCED BY the philosopher Wittgenstein's theory of language, playwright Tom Stoppard developed Dogg, a dialect which uses the English language but assigns different meanings to each word. Stoppard teaches his audience Dogg in the first play of his pair, Dogg's Hamlet, and uses it to convey his point in the second, Cahoot's Macbeth. He writes: "the first is hardly a play at all without the second, which cannot be performed without the first...
...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...