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The Real Inspector Hound
The Real Inspector Hound
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Author: Tom Stoppard Publisher: Samuel French (cover may change) # of Pages: 48 Pub. Date: 1968 Edition: Acting ISBN-10: 0573614679 ISBN-13: 9780573614675 Cast Size: 3 female, 6 male
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About the Book:
The Real Inspector Hound is a full-length comedy by Tom
Stoppard. This is a spoof on the who-done-it tradition of Agatha
Christie, providing all the cliches of the genre the isolated country
house, the foggy marshes, the eccentric suspects each with their own
secrets and each with a motive for murder. Along with Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound is one of Tom
Stoppard's best-known, most performed plays.
The Real Inspector Hound centres around feuding theatre
critics Birdboot and Moon who attend the premiere of a new murder
mystery. Birdboot is a veteran reviewer known in British circles as a
first-string critic and avid womanizer who has the hots for one (and
then two) of the actresses. Moon is a second-string reviewer called
out at the last moment to replace his paper's first-stringer and is
beset with self-doubt and jealousies. They soon find themselves
inside the play-within-a-play, implicated in the lethal activities of
an escaped madman. In the hilarious spoof of Agatha Christie-like
melodramas that follows, the body under the sofa proves to be the
missing first string critic. As mists rise about isolated Muldoon
Manor, Moon and Birdfoot become dangerously implicated in the lethal
activities of an escaped madman. Will Inspector Hound arrive in time?
Can he find the murderer in time? Who indeed is the real Inspector
Hound? Does it matter? All of these questions will be answered as
Moon and Birdboot become more and more intertwined with the action
onstage, leading to a dramatic and surprising finale.
The Real Inspector Hound premiered in 1968 at the Criterion
Theatre in London. In 1972, this long one-act masterpiece of farce
(typically less than eighty minutes in performance) premiered
Off-Broadway at Theater Four in New York. Stoppard directed a London
revival of the play at the National Theatre in 1985, and the play had
a Broadway revival in 1992 at the Criterion Theatre Stage Right on a
double-bill with The Fifteen Minute Hamlet.
Rave reviews greeted a second major London revival in 1998 on a
double-bill with Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy. The play is
regularly performed in regional repertory, high school, college, and
community theatre productions.
Cast: 3 female, 6 male
What people say:
"What absurd fun Tom Stoppard
created when he let fantasies run wild." — Evening
Standard
"Witty and delicious parody of
the fog bound whodunit." — The Guardian
"A tour de force of theatrical
metaphysics." — Daily Mail
"A masterpiece.... Stoppard
mines murder mystery conventions and strikes gold." —
Independent on Sunday
"Zanily, crazily funny."
— The New York Times
"Comedy satire of delightful
quality." — New York Post
About the Playwright:
Sir Tom Stoppard
(born Tomás Straüssler) is a Czech-born British playwright and
screenwriter. His family had to flee to Singapore at the onset of the
Nazi invasion. The family moved to England in 1946, where he left
school at the age of seventeen to work for The Western Daily
Press, in Bristol. He was catapulted into the front ranks of
modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead opened in London in 1967, for which he was awarded a Tony,
the Prix Italia, the New York Critic's Award, and Plays and Players
Award for Best New Play. He has written prolifically for TV, radio,
film and stage, and in 1998 shared a best original screenplay Oscar
for Shakespeare in Love. He was knighted in 1997.
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