✭✭✭✩✩ / ✭✭✭✭✩ 

by Tom Stoppard, directed by Nicole Lee /Stuart Scadron-Wattles

Theatre & Company, Market Theatre, Kitchener

September 15-30, 2000

“The Adventures of Inspector Hound and Inspector Foot”

Tom Stoppard’s delightful confection “The Real Inspector Hound” (1968) and the lesser work “After Magritte’ (1970) were both written when Stoppard would still have been classified as a purveyor of the Theatre of the Absurd.  The paradoxes about art and reality are much simpler and more superficial in these early plays than one finds in his recent, almost elegiac works.  “Inspector Hound” is both a knowing satire on theatre critics and a hilarious spoof of the murder mystery.  Two critics, Birdboot and Moon, are so good at projecting themselves into the  mystery they are watching that they literally become involved on stage in what they see.  “After Magritte”, though not as interesting, is a suitable companion piece since it also concerns an inspector who turns out to be both the main witness and the alibi for a crime he is investigating but which never happened.  As performed by Kitchener’s local professional theatre company, Theatre & Company, these two one-acters make for a very entertaining evening.

Nicole Lee’s direction of “Inspector Hound” was fine in ensuring that the essentials of the play come across, but in general, I felt she gives the play too rapid a pace.  Judicious use of pauses would have allowed more of Stoppard’s many jokes and jokes within jokes to register with the audience.  A number of very funny lines and even some stage business are missed by having things move along too quickly.  She does, however, manage the transition smoothly from the critics watching the play to actually being in the play.  She also makes sure that the acting style of the two critics is clearly different from the intentionally hokey acting of those in the play within the play.  Alan K. Sapp is especially good as the critic Birdboot, who reveals more about his womanizing the more he tries to deny it.  Andrew Lakin as Moon, the frustrated substitute reviewer, is excellent at portraying the would-be intellectual, able to read any meaning to any material no matter how trivial.  Both make the most of showing their amazement at suddenly finding themselves on stage. 

The characters of the play within the play are all caricatures, but some are captured better than others.  Peggy Wrightson is hilarious as Mrs. Drudge, the maid of the Muldoon Manor, who can manage to clean a whole drawing room without noticing a corpse under the settee.  George Joyce perfectly captures the typical Colonel Mustard role of Magnus, a wheelchair-bound curmudgeon.  Linda Bush is very fine as Cynthia, the grand lady of the house, who is as concerned with her appearance as with anything she says.  On the other hand, both Matt Lancaster as Simon, the mysterious philanderer, and Elana Post, as Felicity, the woman he has thrown over for Cynthia, do not enunciate clearly enough so that all the humour of their lines comes through.  Mike Peng, who seems to be putting on a Scottish accent as Inspector Hound, is  not always easy to understand.  Nevertheless, Stoppard’s satire of dramatic conventions and the impossibility of objective criticism comes across quite clearly.

“After Magritte”, a less substantial piece and much harder to put across, became under Producing Artistic Director Stuart Scadron-Wattles’ imaginative direction the best production I have seen of it.  The play begins with an absurd tableau (not unlike one of the Belgian painter’s canvases) for which we gradually see the underlying causes and is about an absurd image of a hopping man, interpreted differently by everybody, for which we eventually discover the rational explanation.  Linda Bush and Alan K. Sapp are excellent as the ballroom-dancing husband and wife under investigation.  Their scene of bickering while executing a complex tango is the highlight of the play.  Peggy Wrightson is fine in the lesser role as the husband’s tuba-playing mother as is Elana Post as the snooping policewoman, Holmes.  Mike Peng is again the inspector, Inspector Foot this time (“Foot of the Yard”), who without the Scottish accent is excellent at making Foot’s lengthy and ultimately pointless series of accusations and suppositions as entertaining as possible.  It is all cleverly topped off with Magritte-inspired curtain calls. 

Dennis Horn has designed the sets and costumes for both plays.  In “Inspector Hound” he visually distinguishes the young pseudo-intellectual Moon  from the pompous over-the-hill Birdboot so we can almost predict their points of view just by looking at them.  He has wittily dressed the cast of the play within the play in costumes of the early 1950s, suitable for a take-off on an Agatha Christie mystery.  “After Magritte” is set in the late 1960s and is decked out appropriately. Given the three-quarter thrust of the Market Theatre stage, the sets for both plays are simple but effective.  Stuart Scadron-Wattles has designed the lighting for both plays.  I especially liked the effect he creates for the “intermissions” in the play within the play in “Inspector Hound”.

It’s good to see this small theatre company, now in its eleventh year, giving many people their first look at these early plays by Stoppard.  Those who already know his work will be pleased with Theatre & Company’s lively productions; those who are new to Stoppard will want to see more.

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Alan K. Sapp. ©2010 Denise Grant Photography.