Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, two one-act riffs on Shakespeare and miscommunication, are not Tom Stoppard’s best work. The 1979 Broadway run closed after 28 performances, and it’s not hard to see why.
The first one-act, Dogg’s Hamlet, feels like a stilted graduate-school experiment, not a fully realized play. (Stoppard has said it was inspired by a passage in Wittgenstein, which he wrote into the script.) It takes place among a pack of British schoolkids and their teachers who speak “dogg,” a language that uses English-sounding words but is not English. Here’s a typical exchange, with the English translation in parentheses: “Cretinous git?” (“What time is it, sir?”) “Trog poxy.” (“Half past three.”) “Cube, git.” (“Thank you, sir.”) It’s cute for a few minutes, but the charm wears off quickly. After some miscommunication with a frustrated deliveryman, who speaks plain English, the boys and teachers recite a 15-minute version of Hamlet, also in plain English. So far, so blah.
Cahoot’s Macbeth is the funnier and more sinister half, inspired by real-life theater artists in Prague who were hounded by secret police and banned from the stage, so they began performing clandestine versions of Macbeth in people’s living rooms. In Cahoot’s, an unctuous inspector barges in on one of these performances, belittles the blacklisted actors (“Well, well, so now you’re sweeping floors, eh?”), and demands they continue the show while he sits and sneers.
Tall and blond with a smile that drips venom, Robert Hinds as the inspector works the stage like a seasoned Vegas showman—but his jokes are daggers. “Now listen, you stupid bastard,” he growls when one of the actors balks, “you’d better get rid of the idea that there’s a special Macbeth which you do when I’m not around, and some other Macbeth for when I am around which isn’t worth doing. You’ve only got one Macbeth. Because I’m giving this party and there ain’t no other.” He turns to the audience with a megawatt smile: “It’s what we call a one-party system!” Wocka-wocka.
Hinds’s deft and multilayered menace—watching his character relish intimidating and stealing the spotlight from worthier actors—is the highlight of an otherwise so-so production of Tom Stoppard’s lesser works. 
