“I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I’m the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. Forever. Endlessly.” — Tom Stoppard from an interview with Mel Gussow in the New York Times, April 26,1972.
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Mrs Drudge (Tasnim McWilliams) welcomes Inspector Hound (Joseph Bowes) to Muldoon Manor |
The Newtowne Players continue their performances of The Real Inspector Hound this weekend. The show opened Friday, Aug. 4 to a full house and was sold out last Saturday evening. The shows continue this weekend and three additional performances have been added for the following weekend, beginning Thursday, August 17.
The play is the creation of Tom Stoppard, an English playwright perhaps best known for his humorous play featuring minor Shakespearian characters, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. The Real Inspector Hound follows in the absurdist tradition Stoppard’s works are often associated with. It is both tragic and humorous.
Some viewers may enjoy it as a lighthearted, implausible farce – “silly summer fun,” as one person described it following the opening performance. Indeed it is full of humor and succeeds as a tongue-in-cheek parody of your typical “whodunit.”
However, the play has another dimension to it that will appeal to the more serious spectator. And who says one must take plays lightly? Certainly not the critics. For them the play is deadly serious.
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| Lady Muldoon (Wendy Heidrich) and Inspector Hound stand over the mysterious dead body. |
While the opening banter between the two theatre critics, Moon and Birdboot, is a humorous parody of their own personal and professional obsessions, and their pretentious reviews, don’t let their affectations and triviality fool you. Without seeming to know it their critiques and conversation are insightful. The reverberating question, “Where’s Higgs?” proves to be an important one.
The play is a ridiculous murder mystery, adapted by The Newtowne Players to a St. Mary’s County setting, yet it is, nonetheless, likely to prove to many viewers to be a challenging piece of drama. Moon and Birdboot, accidentally become involved in the action of the implausible play-within-a-play, the plot is mirrored, questions of free will and fate are subtly explored, and the audience becomes less sure of the boundaries between play and “reality,” as the actors’ lives on and off stage become less distinct.
First performed at London’s Criterion Theatre in June of 1968, The Real Inspector Hound is “…a comedy satire of high and delightful quality, and great fun. The action is fast, continuous, and extremely funny,” according to Richard Watts of the New York Post, a theatre critic himself who was obviously able to overlook Stoppard’s lampooning of critics.
“We know comedy works in t
