Customer Reviews

The Real Inspector Hound

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Tom Stoppard's convoluted farce plays with identity and the nature of reality. There is a play within a play--a marvelous send-up of drawing room mysteries--and a couple of drama critics who comment on the stage action in rather oblique ways that often make it seem that they may actually be speaking of their relations with the actors playing the characters. Then they enter the action of the play and everyone seems compelled to remain in character. I suppose one could read a lot into this, such as the nature of the roles we play in society or the degree to which the reality we experience is deterministic or preordained, but frankly I just enjoyed the humor. It's too clever by half to be a meaningful statement about the human condition, but just witty enough to be a terrific comedy.

Tom Stoppard loves multilayered writing and drama, creating comedy or even farce.

This play is an allusion to An Inspector Calls. It uses travesties, double or triple identities like Shakespeare in his comedies. It is a direct descendant of Samuel Beckett's absurd drama. It is an allusion to Murder by Death. It is thus a parody of many models and even a parody of a parody.

But it is also built with a mirror projecting the audience onto the stage, then projecting this projected audience into the play, and the actors into this projected audience of critics. This is again a multifaceted mirror.

Finally no one is true, no one is false, no truth is true, and no truth is false. All theories are purely abstract, absurd and abscond fantasies. The last layer of parody and criticism is directed at the police of course as for the plot of the play, and the critics as for the performance of the play and the play itself.

Stoppard is a hard hitting satirist cast loose onto the public, the critics and society. Catch out of it what you can. And nothing if you can't catch anything. Too bad for you. Stoppard will not cry.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU