Metro
Stage's production ‘Hound' has bark, bite
Actors
capture tone, feel of Stoppard's classic
By David Hoffman
Friday, May 13, 2011
Tom
Stoppard is the consummate dramatist of concepts more than characters.
Born
Tomas Straussler in 1937 in Zlin,
Stoppard
later took his English stepfather's surname after his own father was captured
and killed by the Japanese, who had invaded
Stoppard
rightly has been considered one of the world's greatest English-speaking
playwrights since his early triumph with "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead," which catapulted him to the forefront of
modern dramatists when it opened in
His
plays often have been described primarily as a theater of ideas, often
featuring real-life personalities, such as the English poet and scholar A.E.
Housman in 1997's "The Invention of Love."
In
"Travesties" (1974), it was novelist James Joyce, Bolshevik
revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, the
avant-garde Romanian-French symbolist poet, meeting in a
A
perfect example is fully represented in one of his earliest plays, "The
Real Inspector Hound," at Metro Stage in Old Town Alexandria through May
29. Written between 1961 and 1962, it's a one-act farce that spoofs the cozy
crime-fiction conventions of Agatha Christie, especially her famous
long-running whodunit, "The Mousetrap." But it also takes jabs at the
iconic figure of the ingenious super-sleuth Sherlock Holmes, made famous in the
short stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
"In
general terms," Stoppard has said of himself, "I'm not a playwright
who is interested in character ... and psychology," but rather "I'm a
playwright interested in ideas and forced to invent characters who express
these ideas."
This
cool, meta-attitude, with calculated intellectual bravura, often uses the
device of the play-within-a-play, illustrated perfectly by this comedy
tour-de-force, which is a true tongue-in-cheek parody.
Stoppard
in fact laughs out loud especially at all those time-worn Christie conventions
-- a mysterious stranger, a murderer on the loose, bodies piling up in a remote
manor house, the suspicion that one of the weekend guests "must" be
the murderer, and the entry of the savvy detective to put everything right,
thereby restoring the moral order.
Set in "secluded"
Muldoon manor, surrounded by "desolate marshes," in fact it is said
in a droll aside there are "no roads leading from the manor, though there
are ways of getting to it, weather permitting."
Stoppard's play was written when he mostly was unemployed and before
his huge hits began to pile up after the tragicomedy "Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead." The absurdist retelling of "Hamlet" from
the perspective of its clueless minor characters won four Tony Awards including
Best Play in 1968. And Stoppard's screenplays won
plaudits, including for Terry Gilliam's "
Skillfully
helmed by veteran director John Vreeke, "The
Real Inspector Hound" glitters with bright wit as Stoppard dissects
without mercy the traditional tropes so familiar to fans of police procedurals
and classic English murder mysteries. The play is such unmitigated fun that you
are almost certain to sit tingling on the edge of your seat, waiting for the
next unexpected twist and unforeseen turn.
Metro
Stage has done us all a huge favor by bringing together three of the stars of
an earlier play, "Heroes," staged there several years, where they won
that year's Helen Hayes Award for outstanding ensemble in a resident
production. Vreeke, himself a four-time best director
Helen Hayes Awards nominee, directed that play also, which in fact Stoppard had
translated from the original French.
In
this play, nothing that is apparent is real. Even the fourth wall of the stage,
absent as the play opens, entirely dissolves halfway through when all
boundaries between actors and audience are broken into pieces.
But
first we meet two theatre critics sitting in other seats but facing us. There's
Moon (Ralph Cosham) and Birdboot
(Michael Tolaydo), the former afflicted with a huge
inferiority complex as the second-string reviewer from his paper, and the
latter a philanderer cheating on his wife with every ingenue
he can bed after he gives her a swooning review.
There's
another actor already on stage, but he is quite dead. The corpse, who naturally
never moves, is partly covered beneath a settee and is somehow ignored by the
other actors in the play, the one that the two critics have come to review.
Never paying him a moment's attention, they simply walk around him.
This is a real cast of
"characters," including the third member of the "Heroes"
trio, John Dow, as the mysterious Major Magnus Muldoon -- crippled half-brother
of the glamorous vixen, Lady Cynthia Muldoon (Emily Townley),
who oozes a come-hither sensuality. Others in the cast stand out, including a
hilarious impression of the household maid, Mrs. Drudge, delivered with Cockney
accent and formidable tolerance for her so-called "betters" and with
true wit by a true Brit (Catherine Flye).
Then
there's Cynthia's beautiful young friend, Felicity (Kimberly Gilbert), who
hardly lives up to her name. She is seemingly sweet but suggestive of murderous
malice. There's also the mysterious stranger, handsome Simon Gascoyne (Doug Krehbel), who has
had affairs with both Cynthia and Felicity.
He
takes an immediate dislike to Magnus, who also nurses a strong desire for his
late half-brother's widow.
Motives
for murder pile up, and before long there are more than just one corpse on
stage. Meanwhile, Moon and Birdboot have gotten -- literally, and fatally -- into the act. In the
process, the roles of theatre critics are thoroughly skewered. Writing reviews
is how Stoppard, who never went to university, got his start before crossing
over to writing plays instead of reviewing them.
At
the end, the big surprise reveals the real murderer and who is the
"real" Inspector Hound.
The
title in fact is a direct reference to the ending of Christie's classic
long-running whodunnit "The Mousetrap," a
play also well-known for guarding the secrecy of its own twist finale.
Suffice
it to say here that all the loose ends -- and there are many -- are neatly tied
up with elegance, and you will almost certainly never see them all coming.