In the following essay excerpt, Billington examines the truncation of Shakespeare and the word games found in Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth.

At the same time as Night and Day was running at the Phoenix and Undiscovered Country at the Olivier (both plays deriving from mainstream European naturalism), Stoppard also had performed in London two linked one-act plays, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth that were anti-naturalistic in style and cerebral. They brought together several of Stoppard's prime concerns: Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, language-games, and the heavy-handed persecution of artists (and many others) in Czechoslovakia. Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth were written for BARC: the British American Repertory Company which was devised by Ed Berman as a means of allowing non-star actors to function on either side of the Atlantic. It was a useful, if short-lived, idea. And it encouraged Stoppard to conceive an entertainment that was playful and serious at the same...