Not many plays feature a dead body as one of its characters.
"The Real Inspector Hound," however, is a play that aims to entertain.
The play follows two theater critics as they get swept up in the onstage action of the murder mystery they are reviewing.
A play within a play (or, rather, a spoof within a farce), "The Real Inspector Hound" juggles the real world of the two critics and the overblown, fictional world of the actors on stage. The play examines the blurred lines between the real and the unreal.
The two critics become the axis around which the murder mystery revolves.
They're less-than-charming people — Moon (Steve Berneman '02) is a second-tier critic obsessed with his standing in the journalistic world.
Birdboot (Sujan Trivedi '03) is a sleazy critic of somewhat good repute, who writes flattering reviews for women he's interested in.
They are both unwarrantedly pretentious, and they lapse into high-strung, faux-intellectual mode when they write. Moon at one point declares in his critique, "Je suis . . . ergo sum."
The comic mayhem takes off when they are both unwittingly sucked into the onstage world, where the action starts to mirror their own lives.
The play onstage is in the vein of traditional murder mysteries and even features the requisite maid and old crazy colonel in a wheelchair.
The mystery follows a more or less routine format, with all the usual twists and turns that might be expected of a play of its genre.
The characters themselves sometimes come across as caricatures, which lends the actors a certain freedom in being flamboyant with their roles.
Director Brian Barrett '03 encouraged the actors to play their parts "to the fullest extent they [could] be played" without coming across as distasteful.
Barrett began by rehearsing the critics separately from the murder mystery characters. To make the play work, he needed to "keep [the critics] distinct from the onstage action," he said.
The critics must be very "grounded in reality," he said, to contrast with the almost exaggerated "unreality" of the onstage universe.
Staging a play within a play posed some logistical problems, Barrett said. The murder mystery action transpires onstage, which leaves few options for the placement of the two critics.
The ultimate solution was to build a balcony. The critics are perched up there, a la grumpy men from "The Muppet Show."
Overall, "The Real Inspector Hound" is meant to be good fun. The playwright, Tom Stoppard, has a reputation for writing smartly funny plays.
Some of his most famous works, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," "After Magritte," "Arcadia" and "The Real Thing," have netted critical acclaim.
He won an Oscar in 1999 for his contributions to the script of "Shakespeare in Love."
His work can be complicated and, at times, cerebral.
Though "The Real Inspector Hound" may very well be complex, it is often straightforward slapstick.
In the introduction to the play, Stoppard iterates that the foremost role of theater is to serve as recreation and diversion.
Barrett seems to have taken Stoppard's advice to heart. He said his prime objective is to "present something that is outright funny and entertaining."
Certainly the play is thought-provoking and well-written.
Certainly it has substance enough to keep critics gnawing at its literary meat. But it's also meant to be outrageous and hilarious.
The way Barrett sees it, "The Real Inspector Hound" seems to celebrate fun for fun's sake.
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