129. Cahoot’s Macbeth by Tom Stoppard

Stoppard’s play Cahoot’s Macbeth was written as a companion-piece to an earlier play, Dogg’s Hamlet. ‘Cahoot’, which to an English audience suggests ‘cahoots’, in the conspiracy sense — the play deals with a sort of linguistic conspiracy — was in fact named after a Czechoslovakian playwright, Pavel Kohout (or Kahout), who Stoppard met briefly in 1977.

Theatre in Czechoslovakia following the post-Dubçek crackdown had been heavily restricted, and Kahout, in response, had devised a ‘reduced’ Macbeth that could be performed out of a suitcase in the living-room of a Prague flat. In homage to Kahout, Cahoot’s Macbeth contains a similar edited Macbeth, but this time interlarded with a plot that features some of the characters from Dogg’s Hamlet, as well as a critic in the form of a secret policeman.

Consulted:
Billington, Michael: Stoppard (1987)