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DIRTY LINEN AND NEW-FOUND-LAND and DOGG'S HAMLET, CAHOOT'S
MACBETH by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Ed Berman. Presented by
the British American Repertory Company at the Wilbur Theater,
Boston, November 1979.
The plays of Tom Stoppard fall neatly into two categories
-- major and minor -- and one tends to consider the minor
works, all one-acters, dismissible trifles. This is an
understandable mistake. Each of them, from the defiantly
frivolous entertainments After Magritte and The Real
Inspector Hound to the more somber
play-for-actors-and-orchestra Every Good Boy Deserves
Favour, is based on a single, though not necessarily
simple, Bright Idea. By contrast, Stoppard's full-length works
-- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers,
Travesties, Night and Day -- are worlds unto themselves:
sprawling, ambitious, contradictory, over-stuffed. It would be
in the spirit of our time to proclaim here that less is more;
however, in the case of the two Stoppard shows that make up
the newly formed British American Repertory Company's premier
season, it is safer to say that less is not bad.
Both Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land and Dogg's
Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth are pairs of cleverly
interlocking one-acts. Dirty Linen depicts the meeting
of a Select Committee formed to investigate a curious
Parliamentary sex scandal -- to wit, that some 119 MPs are
rumored to have misbehaved, all with the same woman, a certain
"titian-haired" bombshell. The joke is that the
committee's five men and one woman number among those
implicated, and the stenographer sent to cover the
proceedings, whose skills are less than secretarial ("You
do speed-writing, I suppose?" "Yes, if I'm given
enough time"), turns out to be the notorious femme fatale
herself, Maddie Gotobed. While the committee attempts to draft
a report squashing the rumors yet paying lip service to
"moral standards," the perky enchantress interrupts
with her cheerful observations that the press invents sex
scandals simply to sell papers, that the people don't really
care what government officials do in their spare time, and
that it's none of their business anyway. The whole
investigation is a farce. Not surprisingly, so is Dirty
Linen.
In the middle of Dirty Linen, Stoppard manufactures a
recess that allows the introduction of New-Found-Land,
a monologue disguised as a meeting of two other MPs to
consider an American's application for British citizenship.
The monologue is a long, fantastic verbal tour of America that
is at once a hilarious send-up of Walt Whitman, a compendium
of American patriotic myths and literary cliches, and a
breathtaking comic rhapsody. What binds this playlet to Dirty
Linen is a sort of in-joke. Director Ed Berman, who also
heads Inter-Action, the British community-arts organization
that sponsors BARC, commissioned from Stoppard a play about
America to be performed at his lunch-hour Almost-Free Theater
in London. The playwright took off on a meditation about
government-sex scandals, for which he had plenty of material;
the Wayne Hays/Elizabeth Ray and Wilbur Mills/Fanne Foxe
affairs were nothing compared to the tales of promiscuous
partying that rocked Parliament a few years ago. Dirty
Linen resulted, and Stoppard then wrote New-Found-Land
"to re-introduce the American Connection." Both
plays were performed for the first time on April 5, 1976 --
the date that Ed Berman, whose description matches that of the
American in New-Found-Land, was granted British
citizenship.
Similar true-life stories lurk behind Dogg's Hamlet,
Cahoot's Macbeth. Berman also runs a children's theater
group called Prof. Dogg's Troupe, which is famous in London
for its 15-minute condensation of Hamlet. Another
friend of Stoppard's, Czech playwright Pavel Kohout -- who,
like a number of his countrymen (including recently jailed
author Vaclav Havel), has been forbidden to work in the
theater because of his outspoken political dissidence --
kicked off his underground, self-explanatory Living Room
Theater with a condensed version of Macbeth. So Dogg's
Hamlet features a bunch of schoolboys whose native tongue
is Dogg, a sort of skewed English ("You don't learn it,
you catch it," someone eventually quips), and who are
rehearsing Hamlet for some special awards-day assembly
when a Cockney truckdriver arrives with a load of lumber to
build the stage. Since carpentry terms like plank, cube, and
block mean in Dogg things like "Ready,"
"Thanks," and "Here!" and since everyday
expressions in Dogg seem to be Cockney insults and vice versa,
misunderstandings abound. ("Cretinous pig-faced git,"
calls out one boy to a retreating headmaster, who wheels
around, consults his pocket watch, and snaps, "Trog poxy.")
Shakespeare seems to serve as a safe middle ground, and indeed
the highlight of the play is a breezy but complete 15-minute Hamlet
capped by a manic, two-minute "encore" version.
Cahoot's Macbeth takes place in a Prague parlor. A
streamlined version of the tragedy is underway when a
sarcastic government inspector (a sinister reincarnation of
Inspector Hound) barges in on the illicit performance. Between
making amusingly acerbic remarks on theater in general and
commending the actors on their recent performances as
waitresses and street-cleaners, the villainous inspector
delivers a warning that unless the show is halted the
performers will be arrested. After he leaves, they continue
undaunted and when he returns to make good his threat, the day
is saved by the sudden appearance of the Cockney truckdriver,
now speaking fluent Dogg. The actors pick it up and finish Macbeth
in this meaningful gibberish, to the enraged bewilderment of
the Inspector.
These two evenings of theater are remarkably alike. Each is a
linguist's delight, full of puns, stylized language jokes, and
the word-wizardry for which Stoppard is famous. Each uses
comedy to convey a moral fable and has its own tricky
theatricality. Neither play, however, achieves the integration
of wordplay, story line, character, and commentary that
characterizes Stoppard's masterworks (the best of which, Night
and Day, makes its Broadway debut later this month). But
to complain that dirty Linen and Dogg's Hamlet
are not Travesties is perhaps to miss the point. The
insidious invasion of privacy and the trivia-mongering that go on
in the name of "the people's right to know," and the
cowardly hypocrisy officials resort to rather than defending
their right to live their own lives, are worthy targets for
satire; Stoppard addresses them in Dirty Linen with
just the right mixture of seriousness and silliness. And
Maddie Gotobed not only is an updated female equivalent of the
Restoration comedy stud who services all the townswomen but
also is a wonderful inversion of the stereotypical "dumb
blonde." She knows more than anyone else about power,
politics, and propriety, and she's not ashamed of her liberal
sex life. Likewise, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth
cuts right to the futility of government attempts to control
free expression.
To sing these plays' praises is not, however, to overlook
their deficiencies. Dogg's Hamlet and especially Cahoot's
Macbeth seem quite flawed. The latter leans too heavily on
Shakespeare to no narrative purpose; it covers the same
territory as Stoppard's TV play Professional Foul
without the same force; and it often begs minimum credibility,
as when the character Cahoot suddenly begins speaking to the
truckdriver in Dogg (where did he "catch" it?). The
best points made in their pair of plays are about language.
The notion of florid Shakespearean English as a foreign
language is novel and not without oddball accuracy, and there
is some subtle Stoppardian irony at work when we strain to
understand the characters speaking fractured English in Dogg's
Hamlet but accept without questioning the illogical
theatrical convention that foreign characters like the Czechs
in Cahoot's Macbeth speak perfect English. What should
be Stoppard's neatest trick -- teaching the audience a new
language in the first play that it'll have to know to get the
second play -- doesn't quite work. The audience doesn't really
learn enough Dogg to make a difference, so the idea remains an
intellectual proposition.
Intellectual propositions are also forced to sustain Dirty
Linen through stretches of very labored wordplay. An
ongoing tongue-twisting exercise involving the names of London
restaurants isn't even funny; and the recurring appearance of
extra pairs of panties pays off when the committee chairman
wipes the blackboard with his undershorts and deposits them --
where else? -- in his briefcase. (Mr. Stoppard, please!) The
best running joke, and a longtime Stoppard obsession, springs
from the pretentious (and peculiarly British?) practice people
have of dropping gratuitous foreign phrases into regular
speech; this one peaks at the end, when one committee member,
the lone holdout against sexual permissiveness, announces,
"It seems I am presented with, to put it in plain
English, a fait accompli." Of course, only Tom
Stoppard -- who is peerless among today's English-speaking
playwrights -- could provoke criticism for having an excess of
witty wordplay and intellectual propositions, which many
playwrights seem never to have heard of. I can't imagine
anyone who loves theater passing up the opportunity to see any
Stoppard plays.
I feel as if I should have something significant to say about
the British American Repertory Company -- the first troupe
composed equally of English and American actors and approved
by Equity in both countries -- but I don't. It's a good idea,
and it's about time the unions got around to cooperating with
one another, but I've seen better productions (these seem
lumbering, as if tired of living out of suitcases) and
certainly better actors. Most of BARC's are competent, but
Alexander Spencer is egregiously bad in Dirty Linen.
Stephen D. Newman, John Challis, and Peter Grayer are
excellent in everything, and Davis Hall's spell-binding
recitation of the "O America!" speech in New-Found-Land
steals the show. Still, the star of BARC's first tour, without
a doubt, is Stoppard.
Boston Phoenix, November 6, 1979
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