Theater: Katt’s Ploy

DOGG’S HAMLET, CAHOOT’S MACBETH

by Tom Stoppard

Having utilized Shakespeare to resonant effect in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard now offers playgoers the flippest of flip sides. In Dogg’s Hamlet, the first of two interrelated playlets, Stoppard telescopes tag lines and famous scenes to distill the doings of the broody Dane into a dizzying quarter-hour of comic relief. Then he caps it off with an even dizzier reprise, a 204-word two-minute version. In the larger version, Hamlet gets as far as “To be, or not to be . . .” when Ophelia pipes up “My lord,” only to be scaldingly dismissed with “Get thee to a nunnery!” In the dietetic No-Cal version, Ophelia enters, “falls to ground. Rises and pulls gravestone to cover herself.” The slimline Macbeth, with Stephen D. Newman and Ruth Hunt, is a sweet-and-sour spoof hung behind the Iron Curtain.

These amusements are complicated by the fact that the native tongue of the players is not English but Doggese, a kind of revisionist lingo in which words have arbitrarily assigned meanings. When someone says “Sun-dock-trog-pan-slack,” he is counting from one to five.

The show is staged by a new company, known as BARC (British American Repertory Company), a binational acting troupe with an unguessable potential.

BARC certainly whizzes through its first tongue-teasing test, but dock, trog, pan and slack are still to come. As for Stoppard, this time it is hard to say whether he preys on words or words prey on him.

T.E.Kalem