[Dogg's Hamlet] is an elaboration of a minor curiosity called Dogg's Our Pet, and [Cahoot's Macbeth is] fresh evidence that its author is becoming a sort of one-man Amnesty International, with a special interest in his native Czechoslovakia. Little need be said about the first, except that it interjects a comically compressed version of Hamlet into [a] whimsical series of verbal jokes…. 'Cretinous git', says a boy to his headmaster, who nods in gracious acknowledgment. 'Sod the pudding club', smiles a great lady as she hands out the school prizes. Over the interval drinks a jealous rumour spread among my fellow-critics, to the effect that the BBC was in possession of the phrase-book that would explain all; but it hardly seemed worth debagging anyone in hopes of finding it. Anyone who knows his W. S. Gilbert or Monty Python should recognise the sounds of topsyturveydom when he hears them: nothing is what it says, much means the exact opposite.

Cahoot's Macbeth is meatier stuff, though it begins with a characteristic Stoppard joke and follows it with plenty more. Three witches circle a smoking pot in the reddish murk, and salute two noblemen with spears; and then up go the lights, and we're actually and oddly in someone's living room. Macbeth turns out to be the well-known Czech actor Pavel Landovsky, and everyone else a member of the suitcase-theatre that has recently been performing abbreviated classics in Prague houses and tenements, more auspicious auditoria having been refused them by the neo-Stalinists presently in power. Before long it is time for the Porter scene. There are three or four enormous bangs on the door, which then crashes open to reveal a smirking lackey in a belted raincoat who proceeds to needle and threaten everyone present. Noting that the intellectuals watching the performance, like those giving it, are actually employed as janitors, cleaners and the like, he congratulates Landovsky on having 'cracked the problem of the working-class audience'. Reminded of the nominal protection his nation's laws give to human rights, he points out that 'a lot of water has passed through the penal code' since Dubcek. Crack follows crack, most of them funny, all of them malicious. We laugh and feel uncomfortable, as Stoppard, who by now has little left to learn about the uses of humour, presumably means us to do.

Unluckily, this burst of didactic comedy is soon over. The secret policeman … makes a temporary exit; Landovsky … continues to demonstrate the political relevance of Macbeth in Husak-territory; then in wanders a character from Stoppard's first play, who proceeds to hail everyone as 'cretinous git' and so on; and the evening begins to look badly in need of the Python military-man who used to interrupt his team's more harum-scarum efforts with the regimental bark, 'Stop, stop, this is getting silly'.

To be fair, there is some point to the nuthouse lingo, which now starts to infect Landovsky's company, bewilder those who are bugging their performance, and enrage the returning cop. It is meant, I think, to suggest that the authorities will always find it difficult to suppress resourceful imaginations, wits and tongues, even if they put their whole nation behind the chunky grey bars that [the policeman] ends the play frantically and symbolically constructing. But the evening as a whole leaves a sketchier, more fragmented, and finally less eloquent impression than what I take to be Stoppard's most successful foray into committed hilarity, the TV play Professional Foul. Both are about usurpation and the abuse of power, not unlike Macbeth itself; but it is the one that ignores, not the one that explicitly invokes, that parallel which comes the nearer to justifying it.