Theatre
The Real Inspector Hound / The Critic (National: Olivier)
Turning the tables
Christopher Edwards
To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say, simply, that it does not happen to be my cup of tea. One has only to compare this ragbag with the masters of the genre to see that here we have a trifle that is not my cup of tea at all. . . . The clichés of theatre reviewing are expertly parodied by Stop- pard in The Real Inspector Hound and I imagine most critics, at some point in this short piece, must experience a slight squirm of recognition as a familiar- sounding phrase is thrust back in their face from the other side of the footlights. As it happens Stoppard has, in truth, never really been my cup of tea. I usually find his wit eminently resistible and his character- isation (particularly of women) thin to the point of invisibility. As for his much heralded cleverness and intellectual aplomb, here, if anywhere, we are surely entitled to opine that he is a middlebrow's idea of a highbrow. All these strictures apply to his writing the more successful and self-consciously clever he has become. The early work, while characteristically Stop- pard, seems more relaxed and free flowing. And of the early work the one with the most pace, focus, wit and originality is The Real Inspector Hound.
As well as guying the clichés of theatre reviewers Stoppard also plays an artful little game with the whodunnit genre. For a time the two parodies work alongside each other, before Inspector Hound (Ian McKellen) arrives on the scene and the playwright takes revenge on his two critics, Birdboot and Moon, by bringing them into the action and having them done away with. As the curtain goes up we meet them as they file their way into their Old Vic seats for a first-night performance. Bird- boot is a down-market hack with a taste for leading ladies and Black Magic chocolates. Moon is a more literary second-stringer for his paper's main critic, Higgs. On stage lies a corpse which no one notices until some way into the plot of the whodunnit. It turns out to be that of Higgs himself, as Moon discovers when he has been drawn into the intrigue soon after Birdboot has been lured onto the stage to answer the telephone. This is all clear so far, and a reviewer of Moon's bent might be tempted to pause here to raise a searching question or two a propos the nature of reality and identity, with perhaps a sidelong reference across to Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. However, it is the Birdboot view that must prevail; what Stoppard gives us is a rattling good bit of theatre.
The dialogue in the whodunnit is glor- iously bad — a perfect send-up of the stock country-house detective story where every- one seems to have a motive, however ludicrous, for murder, and where loaded hints (so to speak) are dropped like bricks. Each of the characters has his absurd moment, but particularly funny was Jonathan Hyde's wheelchair-bound Major Magnus Muldoon with his priceless exit line: 'Well, I think I'll go and oil my gun.' The rest of the cast include Eleanor Bron as Lady Cynthia Muldoon (`in what is `Mind you, with friends like David Owen, who needs enemies?' possibly the finest Lady Cynthia since the war') and Greg Hicks as Simon Gasgoyne. The two critics are played by Roy Kinnear (Birdboot) and Edward Petheridge (Moon), and as soon as both these actors ensure that we hear all their lines I imagine a very funny production will become even more enjoyable.
Sheridan is generally recognised as the finest comic playwright after Congreve and before Bernard Shaw, but whether the decision to pair the Stoppard with Sher- idan's The Critic does full justice to the latter is debatable. This is not because the Stoppard is superior, although in this double bill it raises the most laughter. It is just that The Critic itself was usually put on as a curtain-raiser for something more substantial, and tragic — and here it attracts too much of one's comic expecta- tions and certainly more than it can bear.
Indeed, The Critic itself falls into two separate parts, which only serves to emphasise the slightness of the piece. In the first section we encounter Dangle (Roy Kinnear) and Sneer (Jonathan Hyde) en- gaging in the light-hearted but effective demolition of the vanity of Sir Fretful Plagiary — an absurd scribbler with no talent whom Sheridan's contemporary audi- ences would instantly have recognised as a contemporary tragedian. But even without the topical references this scene holds the stage, thanks to the delightfully acid deliv- ery of Jonathan Hyde, and some very funny agonising by Edward Petheridge's Plagiary, who twists and turns in a hopeless attempt to conceal his mortification at Sneer's report of a recent review of one of his plays.
With the arrival of Ian McKellen's ginger-haired Irish sprite of a Mr Puff the play moves on to the rehearsal scene for which is most famous. Puff, it will be recalled, is the author-producer of a patrio- tic oeuvre called The Spanish Armada through which Sheridan himself was able to send up the nationalistic fervour which seized the country after Spain joined France in the war against Britain. Hence the burlesque Elizabethan characters in Puffs play, and the mock invocation of Elizabeth's rallying call at Tilbury in 1588. Here I felt the loss of topicality did work against the humour, and despite Sneer's dry running commentary the expected mo- ments of humour often failed to material- ise. Where Sheila Hancock's production succeeded was in the occasional panto- mime scene poking fun at the dramatic conventions of the day, and where it came off brilliantly was, appropriately enough, at the very end. In a scene which would have made even de Loutherbourg start in admiration we witness a mini sea battle in which British frigates prevail, the arrival of Thames (and two attendants), John Bull and the triumphant descent from the skies of Britannia in good voice — followed by the total collapse of the set around the cast, and rounded off by the irrepressible Mr Puffs celebrated understatement: 'Well, pretty good — but not quite perfect.'
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