1

Today we’re going to look at “The Real Inspector Hound” And the

question is where to start. Obviously the play is a parody. Among other

works, it exploits and satirises The Hound of the Baskervilles, Cards on

the Table, The Mousetrap and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. But is also

mocks stage conventions generally and teasingly considers the whole

question of identity and the interplay between illusion and reality. In this

talk I’m going to consider three main issues : first, the background to

English crime-writing. Secondly, the theme of identity, illusion and

reality. And lastly what happens in the play itself. In doing so, I shall

refer to numerous other works but, on the whole, I shall try to make the

allusions simple to understand, even without knowledge of particular

scenarios.

First crime fiction. And one question here is how did it begin? Well, in

fact it began from crime fact. It was stimulated by police memoirs,

popular ballads, and the sensational reporting of interesting crimes. This

really got a boost in the 19th century but even before that there was a

strong tradition of making brutal events into art. “The Tragedy of Mr.

Arden of Faversham”, a play published in 1592 and sometimes attributed

to Shakespeare, follows the persistent and eventually successful attempts

of Mistress Arden and her paramour Mosby to murder her husband. This

involves the hiring of two murderers, with the jolly names of Black Will

and Shakebag. What is significant for us is that the whole thing is directly

based on an account by Raphael Holinshed of an actual murder

committed in February, 1551. In 1736 George Lillo (1693-1739)

produced a play on the same subject. Justice triumphed in both drama and

reality – at least to the extent that Mistress Arden and Mosby were both

executed for their horrible crime.

2

The introduction of middle-class domestic tragedy into the often

grandiose world of Elizabethan drama tells us something about popular

taste. It also suggests fears of social upheaval. Technically speaking the

murder by a wife of a husband was a mini-treason. She was his property

and in a sense his subject. By the 19th century this becomes transmuted

into the sexual rampages of popular melodrama. Many real-life murders

were dramatised for stage presentation, the most famous being “The

Murder in the Red Barn”. This was a lurid theatrical version of incidents

at Polstead (Suffolk) where one of the most famous murders in history

had been enacted, causing sensational public interest.

The facts of the Red Barn case are straight-forward. In 1827 the rather

better-born William Corder seduced a village girl Maria Marten and she

disappeared. Corder claimed to know nothing of her whereabouts and

then himself vanished to London. Maria’s stepmother, however, had a

series of vivid dreams in which her daughter seemed to be buried in a red

barn. So convincing were these dream-visions that her husband went to

the place they suggested and began to dig. Maria’s body was discovered,

and Corder was traced to the capital where he was arrested, tried and

hanged for the murder. In a further gruesome twist, his skin was carefully

preserved by the attending doctor, so that it could be used to bind the trial

documents. Corder’s scalp is still on display in Moyses Hall in Bury St.

Edmunds. The Red Barn was later destroyed by fire, although the site is

marked. It stands roughly twelve miles north of Colchester off the A12.

In the stage version of the tragedy Maria goes to the Red Barn to meet

Corder, hoping and expecting that they will elope. The situation is

3

convincing but the language is very stilted with heightened atmospheric

effects. An example is seen in Maria’s arrival at the barn :

Maria : How silent is all around. A fearful gloom seems to hang about

this place. The night is dark and drear. A funeral darkness falls from the

skies, and envelopes the earth.

The language and tone here set the scene for a fateful encounter. The

same too applies, for satirical purposes, in The Real Inspector Hound.

In Maria Marten’s story, as in the Stoppard play, there is much use of

threat and accusations of treachery. It appears that Maria and Corder have

disposed of their illegitimate child and that Maria has been using this as a

hold over Corder. He himself states : “Maria, you threatened me a short

time ago, should aught occur touching our child, I should go with you to

prison.” Maria swears her undying love for the villain but, with typical

metaphorical overstatement, he insists that her threat “hath roused a

scorpion here” (in his breast). Nor is this all. The scorpion, he adds, “doth

gnaw and lash me on to vengeance”. The extent of the emotions is partly

attributable to jealousy. Maria apparently has shown favour to a certain

Matthews : “All thy love was lavished on the hated Matthews, but he

shall feel my vengeance”. It appears that Maria also has a child by

Matthews – an unfortunate infant but one that is at least still alive. This

itself is enough to seal Maria’s doom. The ending is pure melodrama,

duly accompanied by atmospheric music.

19th century melodrama is in many ways a precursor to 20

th century

Hammer Horror. Effects are continually heightened. Characterisation is

4

simplified into heroes (or heroines) and villains. In the Red Barn’s

closing tableau, the murder is gruesomely depicted :

“He again attempts to stab her. She clings round his neck. He dashes her

to the earth, and stabs her. She shrieks and falls. He stands motionless till

the curtain falls”.

So much for Maria Marten. Yet it was not only on the stage that real-life

murder was able to freeze the blood. Melodramatic stage dramas were

reinforced and fed by pamphlets and broadsheets featuring recent

“horrible murders”. One example is the account of the murder of a poor

Liverpool family by John Gleeson Wilson. Wilson is a “miscreant”. He

murdered “in the most brutal manner … two unprotected women and two

helpless children”. He is one of the greatest criminals ever to disgrace the

human family. All this is followed by a lurid, sentimentalised yet

gruesome poem about the event. The verse rhymes in couplets and has a

jog-trot rhythm :

“Come all you feeling Christians and listen unto me,

The like was not recorded in British history;

It’s of three dreadful murders committed, I am told,

By one John Gleeson Wilson for the sake of cursed gold …”

Among other things, we notice the pious uplift at the end. God above is

asked to receive the souls of the slain so that they may reign with him in

Heaven. In the light of the illustration, we also remember that in those

days (1849) execution would usually have been carried out in public.

5

Melodramatic treatments of murder are not just found in newspapers and

popular ballads. They also filter into mainstream literature. An example is

Barnaby Rudge (published 1841) by Charles Dickens – a work in which

Rudge, the murderer, is very melodramatically conceived. Mrs. Rudge’s

grief and horror at his nature and deeds accounts for the birth of an idiot

son, Barnaby. It is a kind of poetic justice and a transferred judgement.

The language in dialogues between Mr. and Mrs. Rudge is artificially

heightened with many archaic touches. Linguistically, it reminds us of the

Maria Marten scenario and of parts of the Stoppard parody.

The Victorian sensation novel is closely linked with the novel of crime

and detection. Wilkie Collins’ “The Woman in White” (1860) is a good

example of an intricately plotted story of mystery, suspense,

psychological perversities and crime. “The Moonstone” (1868, and also

by Collins) features perhaps the first significant detective in a full-length

work of literature – he being Sergeant Cuff, “grizzled, elderly and lean”

and with a passion for growing roses. It is not Collins, however, but

Anthony Trollope who, in “He Knew He Was Right” (1869) introduces

the first private detective to feature prominently in a full-length novel.

The story is one of marital pain, inflexible judgement and sexual

jealousy. The detective is called Bozzle – the name being meant to

suggest the buzzing of an inquisitive bluebottle fly.

Many of the ingredients in The Real Inspector Hound can be traced back

ultimately to Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone, for instance, introduces

several classic features of the later 20th century detective story, some,

though not all, of which filter into our play. These include :

A country house death or robbery

6

An “inside job”

A celebrated but quirky policeman, with an amiable touch of eccentricity.

Bungling local constabulary.

An interest in detective procedures

False suspects - and the actual culprit being among the “least likely”.

A rudimentary “locked room” murder.

A stage reconstruction of the crime.

A final twist in the plot.

It is not only full-length novels that swelled the popular interest in crime.

In miniature form, Collins is sometimes said to be the first British (as

opposed to American) short detective story. This is A Stolen Letter

(1854). He also introduces a police officer in A Terribly Strange Bed

(1852) and the first woman detective in The Diary of Anne Rodway

(1856). His The Biter Bit (1858) may be the first humorous British

detective story, while the first canine detective occurs in his My Lady’s

Money (1877). Interestingly, Charlotte Brontë also makes an indirect

appearance here for it was she who first compared the modern British

detective to a sleuth-hound. The modern word sleuth of course comes

from this.

7

Many of Collins’ books have a crime and detection aspect. Man and Wife

(1870) describes a crude but effective locked room murder, and in The

Haunted Hotel (1879) the murderous Countess Narona is compelled by

destiny to return to the scene of the crime. Among other ingredients we

might note the frantic escape or chase. This applies in The Woman in

White, where Walter Hartright jumps into a cab to lose his pursuers.

There is also the death-bed confession (in Armadale), and the letter “only

to be opened” at some critical moment (in The Woman in White).

Another feature of the traditional detective story is a Gothic element.

Oscar in Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch sends a message for help

written in blood. In The Haunted Hotel Lord Mountbarry’s body is

dissolved in acid, and Henry Westwick takes false teeth from the

decomposing head as a means of identification.

The uprush of melodramatic writing prompted, some think, by the

middle-class mixed fear and fascination in relation to violence stands

very much in contrast to the more cerebral mode of Conan Doyle.

Nonetheless there are links. Doyle too makes ample use of Gothic

settings, remote landscapes and sinister characters. He too produces

villains in thrall to extreme psychological states.

This brings us to questions of identity. Many writers show a

preoccupation with the relationship between acting and identity and

several suggest an overlap between the play-world and the one outside of

it. Pirandello in Six Characters in Search of an Author is an obvious case

in point. In this play an acting company prepares to rehearse the play The

Rules of the Game by Luigi Pirandello. As the rehearsal is about to begin,

they are unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of six strange people. The

8

Director of the play, furious at the interruption, demands an explanation.

The Father, one of the arrivals, explains that they are unfinished

characters in search of an author to finish their story. The Director

initially believes them to be mad, but as they begin to argue amongst

themselves and reveal details of their story he begins to listen. It turns out

that the Father and the Mother had one child together, but they have

separated since when the Mother has had three children by another man.

The Father attempted to buy sex from the Stepdaughter claiming he did

not recognize her, but the Stepdaughter is convinced he knew who she

was the entire time. This and other developments lead to the Director

agreeing to stage their story despite disbelief amongst the jeering

watching actors.

Like The Real Inspector Hound Pirandello’s play sports with ideas of

play-performers interacting with real-life alternatives. In the second half

the Characters are very particular about the setting, wanting everything to

be as realistic as possible. The Director asks the Actors to observe the

scene, for he intends that they should act it out later. This sparks the first

argument between the Director and the Characters, because the latter had

assumed that they would be acting it out themselves. There are also

arguments over the realism of the Actors compared to the reality of the

Characters themselves. This leads the Director to allow the Characters to

act out the rest of the scene, leaving the acted rehearsals for later. The

play ends with The Director confused over whether it was real or not,

concluding that in either case he lost a whole day over it.

It is nothing new, of course, to have the play-world and the real-world

interacting. Nor is the device of the rehearsal a new one. Sheridan in The

Critic brilliantly parodies the historical tragic drama through the

9

presentation of a rehearsal watched by three people who are, of course,

actually themselves actors. Another common trend – at least in

Elizabethan and Jacobean drama – is to include a dumb-show where

actors imitate the deeds and characters of the main play’s leading

characters. The piece called The Mousetrap in Hamlet is an example of

this. It gave Agatha Christie the title for a record-breaking play and in

turn influenced Stoppard, for his own parody mocks some of Agatha’s

ingredients.

In Shakespeare, acting is double-edged. It can be both a mirror held up to

nature and a false projection, even a sign of moral instability. Richard 11

is a consummate actor, his tragedy being that he takes illusion for truth.

Without his “costume” and stage panoply of kingship he is like a man of

water-drops, or a snowman (almost a no-man) melting to nothing. Falstaff

in the Henry IV plays is a brilliant and entertaining actor but his protean

ability to switch modes and voices is one sign of the lack of moral

integrity underlying a changeable and sometimes fickle brilliance.

Comedy is a particularly rich source of treatments of the whole sham

business of acting and performing. W.S. Gilbert’s Thespis from 1871

features an Ancient Greek acting troupe whose members replace the

elderly gods and rule the world for a year (very badly). Verdi’s comic

opera, Un Giorno di Regno has a similar idea. It concerns a certain

Cavalier Belfiore who is in France acting (or posing) as King Stanislaus

1st in order to allow the real sovereign to travel back to Poland to seize

back his lost throne.

The “King for a Day” idea raises all kinds of questions of the reality of

power and the true nature of public icons. Works as diverse as Jean

10

Genet’s The Balcony and W.S. Gilbert’s The Grand Duke (1896) both

explore these preoccupations. Both involve people playing parts of

authority which are a mere act. Both present reality as a hall of mirrors. In

The Grand Duke there is a duel with playing cards, which directly affects

the human roles of the winner and his supporters. What’s more, even the

winning is suspect, since the values of the cards (ace high or ace low)

may be in dispute. In The Balcony, people who act out fantasies of power

in a brothel are called upon to play the roles in real life. Thus someone

who seems to be a bishop may be a gas-man who first privately and then

publicly takes on a kind of virtual reality. Both plays take place in a

revolutionary climate. The difference is that in The Grand Duke it is the

revolutionaries who take over the authority roles. In The Balcony, that job

is undertaken by the revolutionaries’ opponents.

The essence of The Grand Duke is one of subterfuge and self-re-creation.

For complicated plot reasons, the members of a theatrical company take

on roles at the Grand Ducal court in accordance with their professional

position and importance. The self as innate essence is overlaid by the

created self, which may nonetheless reflect real inner tensions and

desires. It is natural, for instance, for the temperamental and haughty

prima donna to demand to play the Grand Duchess, even though the man

playing the Grand Duke is engaged to somebody else. Acting here is part

of the life-blood. Whereas in Thespis the actors are human beings who

just happen to act for their living, in The Grand Duke they are primarily

actors who just happen incidentally to be human beings.

The Grand Duke regularly pulls the ground from under our feet. Ludwig,

the leading comedian, finds his fiancée ousted by the leading lady,

because she is superior in the hierarchy. Julia, the prima donna in

11

question, becomes a kind of fantasy wife. She stages a relationship. Later

she decides to pep it up by acting out an imagined mad scene in which

she strangles a rival who (herself a fantasy) turns out too late to be the

Grand Duke’s aunt.

The Balcony very similarly turns reality to stage illusion. The play opens

with a magnificently robed bishop discoursing in high-flown theological

language. But almost immediately we discover he is not a bishop and we

are not in a bishop’s palace but a brothel. He is, as we have seen, a gas-

man who has paid the “Madame” for the satisfaction of indulging in his

fantasies of sex and power. Later, during a revolutionary uprising, real

representatives of the established power structure are blown away. To

maintain some sort of order, the play-acting characters in the brothel (and

the Madame herself) are invited to masquerade in their place.

The whole scenario of The Balcony suggests the serious aspects of acting

a part. It implies that authority, power and wisdom (whether spiritual,

social or political) are a mask, a sham and a ‘veneering’ in a hall of

mirrors. Charles Dickens sometimes uses the same idea. In Our Mutual

Friend the nouveaux riches Veneerings are associated with a huge

reflective mirror. This replicates the emptiness of their grand dinners and

suggests a lack of substance in themselves.

The falsity of the fantasy life does not deny its potency. Sometimes false

appearances and acting can reveal truth. So they do in Hamlet’s staged

enactment of The Mousetrap. Usually, however, false appearances mask

deception, deceit and hypocrisy. Hamlet’s antic disposition is itself

mainly a cover. It keeps his enemies guessing and allows him wider

scope for investigation and assessment.

12

Another Mousetrap - that of Agatha Christie – is, as we have seen,

directly satirised in Stoppard’s play and there are various plot links. In

both, for instance, the police investigator turns out to be the murderer,

though in The Real Inspector Hound Magnus - the real inspector - is also

Albert Muldoon and (strangest of all) Puckeridge, a theatre critic. In this

way the “solution” is in fact a spiral of surreal possibilities. Another

Agatha Christie work, Cards on the Table, is satirised in the bridge game.

This - and the tennis party - can also be seen as parodying such upper

middle class comedy-dramas as The Circle by Somerset Maugham where

the social round is similarly constituted.

The Stoppard play of course also has its mock-melodramatic passages.

We hear of swirling mists, dangerous cliffs, and lonely dwellings and are

regularly treated to inflated and artificial language The Gothic setting

suggests links with The Hound of the Baskervilles. This is evidenced in

the jokes centred around baying noises offstage and of course the Police-

hound (the inspector) who is at one point confused with a dog.

Stoppard’s use of setting is deliberately absurd. Not only do characters

regularly describe it, as if they are speaking the stage directions but the

ingredients themselves are suspect. This is a play set in low-lying Essex

marshes which nonetheless seem to have cliffs. More confusing still are

the multiple identities of most of the characters. These arise from the

overlapping (indeed, inter-lapping) of the play world and the (so-called)

real world.

It is not only in plays that appearances can deceive or confuse. The

excellent supernatural thriller The Others takes the idea of people

13

misinterpreting their own position, if not their actual identity.

Specifically, it presents a mother and her two children who do not know

(or have suppressed the knowledge) that they are dead. What the mother

regards as ghosts or intruders turn out to be living people - people who

have taken over the house in which, in a fit of despair, she smothered her

children and shot herself.

The boundaries between truth and fiction, appearance and reality are

particularly piquant in comedy. Often - as in The Comedy of Errors - two

people will be confused for each other. But there are more teasing

variants. One example is Rosalind in As You Like It. Rosalind (a girl

originally played by a boy actor) dresses up as a boy, Ganymede, and

then proceeds to play the part of herself for her beloved who fails to

recognise her. Here we have gone beyond mere mistaken identification.

We are in a whirlpool of fused - and confused - identities, all centred in

one person. In its own way this is almost as multi-layered as Stoppard. In

his place Puckeridge and Albert (and possibly the madman who was

insulted by Mc. Coy) are all centred in the single character we know as

Magnus.

Multiple identity is one thing. Another variant is for a reader or audience

to be teased by believing in the real existence of a fantasy creation. José

Carlos Somoza’s brilliant The Athenian Murders is a novel in which the

editor and translator of an apparently genuine Ancient Greek text turns

out to be a figment of the author’s imagination. He is part of the text.

Though seeming contemporary to us, he is shown to be an aspect of the

Ancient Greek author’s original invention. In other words, Somoza

creates a character who seems to be editing an old Greek text. But the so-

called editor increasingly finds himself part of the action. He is, in fact,

14

an invented character, at the mercy of the original Greek author. He is

dependent on the author for the whole for his increasingly bizarre

outcome.

The teasing aspects of The Athenian Murders raise some pertinent

questions. What is Reality? Is life an illusion? If not, do we nonetheless

still try to create our own scripts for our identity other than those which

the Fates or God have penned for us? This in turn promotes literary brain-

teasers. Are characters in charge of their own fate? Do they escape from

their author to re-write themselves? Charlotte Brontë claimed to have no

notion of how she wrote the scene of Lucy Snowe’s drugged walk in

Villette. One could argue in such cases that the writer taps into a greater

pool of Imaginative Energy. His or her task is then to shape the material

to on-going plot requirements.

Isolating one’s personal reality can be difficult . But it is matched by the

difficulty of evaluating realities of other kinds. Examples of these are

power and authority. In The Grand Duke authority is in some ways a

sham. Ludwig becomes Grand Duke in a rigged duel with playing cards.

The pack includes merely painted court figures and the values are in a

sense arbitrary, not innate. In The Balcony there is a similar playing with

image, though as befits a 20th century work the playing card gives way to

the camera flash. Three photographers capture posed and false images of

posing and false authority figures. Everything is contrived, whether on

the rebels’ or the authority side. “When some rebels were captured,” says

the First Photographer, “we paid a militiaman to bump off a chap I’d just

sent to buy me a packet of cigarettes. The photo shows a rebel shot down

while trying to escape”.

15

The idea of the false surface – the image without substance – suggests an

absurdist view of human social structures. In The Balcony there is an

extra dimension in that the false authority figures begin to believe in their

image, or rather to seek to improve and extend it. “You think we’re going

to be satisfied with make-believe to the end of our days?” asks the

Bishop. The Court Envoy meanwhile calls the photographers’ work “a

true image born of a false spectacle”. All authority is sham and the sham

authority figures most truly represent this. Here again there are links with

the false court of Gilbert’s Ludwig. Originally Ludwig – an actor, in a

theatrical company - had been intending to play another monarch, King

Agamemnon. Now, clad absurdly in a Troilus and Cressida costume with

a Louis Quatorze wig, he is celebrating a sham victory with rigged

playing cards by playing a Grand Duke.

The painted trappings of power can bewilder even those bearing them.

When Genet’s false judge calls the false Queen “Irma”, he is momentarily

astonished at his own effrontery. Nonetheless, one part of him still knows

she is a brothel-keeper and a collaborator in false images. The false

figures jostle for real power. Meanwhile, the rebel maid, Chantal, is killed

and immediately mythologized. She is made into a kind of latter-day Joan

of Arc by the rebel opposition.

The possibilities in myth-making are endless. Chantal is a rebel icon. Yet

the Bishop has an idea of re-claiming her for the Church. By his

manipulation, she may yet join the hierarchy of saints and martyrs. In

Somoza’s story, there is a more serious treatment. Somoza himself is the

manipulator. He, not an Ancient Greek, is the real originator - the one

16

who creates the translator who thinks he is alive in a later time and

translating an ancient work.

Questions of identity are not always so surreally handled but, even in

farce, they can evoke many teasing possibilities. In The Comedy of Errors

identity initially seems fluid. Sea and water imagery predominates, being

related to ideas of losing (and finding) oneself and one’s identity. In The

Real Inspector Hound, Moon and Birdboot have their own private

obsessions and idées fixes but, from being drama critics in the audience,

they take these into the different world of stage illusion. They become

part of the play they are watching. Moon’s obsession with Higgs and

Puckeridge enters the realm of the fantasy country house drama and helps

to afford a climax. Meanwhile, there is continued parody of such stage-

devices as the “overhearing” plot and such motifs as the policeman

possibly turning out to be the murderer. The effect is a double-one : we

are in a country house drama yet our attention is drawn to the fact that it

is all an artifice, and indeed such reality as there is (the critics in the

audience) eventually invades and alters the course of it.

Throughout the Stoppard play we are deliberately made aware of effects

of contrivance. Stock characters such as the devoted retainer, maid or

housekeeper declaim their own stage directions. The telephone not only

affects those on stage but seems to link stage characters with the

audience. The radio turns itself on for suspenseful announcements

relevant to the creation of tension and to plot development. The very

artificiality of all this prevents the plot being actually suspenseful and

tense. Even the murders are filtered through the medium of surrealist

comic parody.

17

This brings us to the play itself and here a little background may be

useful. According to what we learn in an admittedly convoluted

development, there are three theatre critics writing for the Press. Higgs is

the first in the hierarchy – the first stringer, as he is called. Moon is the

second, and Puckeridge is the third. Moon, the second string, is haunted

by the idea of Higgs who seems to be almost a shadow-self yet seems

never to be present when Moon is. He is also paranoid about Puckeridge.

He thinks he wishes to take his place, usurping his second string position.

The idea of strings reminds us indirectly that these are characters are

themselves all puppets of the author, Tom Stoppard himself.

The play begins with Moon and yet another critic Birdboot watching a

play, being performed before their and our eyes. Birdboot – self-indulgent

and a ladies’ man – spends much of the time eating chocolates and

ruminating on the lovely actress playing the part of Felicity Cunningham.

Though anxious to preserve the fiction of being happily and faithfully

married, he has evidently been wining and dining the Felicity actress the

night before. She presumably is using him. At any rate he is tipping her

for stardom, which is exactly what she wants.

The main characters in the play are an assortment of precisely the type of

people we might find in an Agatha Christie thriller. There is Lady

Cynthia Muldoon, Felicity, the upper-class ingénue, Simon Gascoyne, a

visiting juvenile lead, and Cynthia’s crippled brother-in-law Magnus.

There is also the faithful working-class retainer Mrs. Drudge. Mystery is

added by the fact that Cynthia’s husband, Albert, disappeared years ago

and that various odd dealings possibly occurred in Canada, involving a

man called Mc.Coy.

18

The use of Mc.Coy – who may turn out to be known too under another

name - is an example of confusing identities. It also takes the non-literal

and makes it literal. This is a Gilbertian trick - in The Mountebanks, first

produced in 1892, the line “He’s got a way with him” is taken literally,

leading to the response “Has he got it with him now?” In Stoppard’s play

“the real Mc.Coy” is similarly treated. The phrase generally means “the

genuine article”. But Mc.Coy here is taken literally. He becomes a

character within the play or possibly a false identity of Moon.

Ambiguous identity is one thing. But it is here combined with formulaic

character ingredients. We are in the world of upper middle class tennis

and bridge parties - familiar territory but treated in parody form. What

complicates the picture is that the characters inhabit an odd borderland

between stage personae and real (or are they imaginary?) people. There is

also a surreal element. The ridiculous terms used in the bridge game

remind us of Alan Ayckbourn’s more sinister use in the play Way

Upstream. Here the pirate Vince’s re-naming of parts of the boat becomes

threatening and undermining but in the Stoppard play the treatment is

purely farcical.

Throughout the first half of Stoppard’s play, cameo scenes between the

characters on stage are interleaved with cameo snatches of dialogue

between Moon and Birdboot. The latter includes another form of satire

and parody, since Moon’s grandiloquent review of the play – the sort of

thing he intends for the Press – is far removed from the actual world of

routine hammy crime-drama. The play itself contains all the usual

ingredients – not only is there a body (which for ages no one seems to

notice) but there are very complex tangles of love-relationships. Magnus

lusts after Cynthia, Cynthia is attracted to Simon, Felicity loves Simon

19

and thought they had an understanding, while Simon adores and fancies

Cynthia. So too, for that matter, does Birdboot who mirrors Simon in

transferring his lusts from Felicity to the glamorous older woman.

One comic device used by Stoppard throughout the play is that of echoing

and repetition. The line “Yes, I’ve heard it said” is spoken first by Simon

to Mrs. Drudge and then later by him again to Felicity. Sometimes whole

scenes parallel each other and whole passages are repeated. For instance,

Simon’s quarrel with Felicity ending with the words, “I’ll kill you for

this, Simon Gascoyne” is repeated several pages later in a quarrel

between Felicity and Birdboot. Cynthia’s quarrel with Simon in which

she calls him a cad is repeated almost verbatim in a quarrel between

Cynthia and Birdboot nearly twenty pages later.

Another comic ingredient is the presence of incompetent police. This has

many precedents. There are examples in The Moonstone, in many Agatha

Christie thrillers, and famously in The Pirates of Penzance. Inspector

Hound – the false one as it later seems – does not in fact enter the play

until over halfway through and, though it has been present from the start,

the corpse is seen for the first time by the characters even later. It is at

about this point that the confusions of identity and plot really begin to

multiply for we now hear about William Mc.Coy, a shadowy character

who once in Canada allegedly insulted a begging madman. This links up

with the radio broadcasts which have already been heard warning

residents of a madman on the loose.

The idea of the madman in the vicinity of the strangely remote Muldoon

Manor is obviously meant to make us – the real audience – think of

Simon. He is a stranger and arrives without clear-cut antecedents. After

20

the usual ratcheting up of suspense in anticipation of another killing,

Simon is, however, shot from offstage. The causes Inspector Hound to

run in again, developing a theory that Simon killed the first corpse. This

still of course leaves the question of the identity of Simon’s own

murderer.

The above is pretty well routine for West End thriller scenarios. Things,

however, are due to get much more complicated. The new tangles are

initiated when the phone rings on stage and the caller turns out to want to

speak to Birdboot. What happens is that Moon is exasperated by the fact

that no one on stage is answering the ringing telephone so he himself

steps up and answers it. He then claims the call is for Birdboot,

apparently from his own long-suffering wife.

The invasion of the critics onto the stage itself blurs the division between

actors and audience. But in fact things are even more complicated.

Birdboot who has wined and dined the actress playing Felicity (in her real

life) now is ecstatic at the chance to play a scene with Cynthia, the

character. Cynthia, for her part, resents his having wined and dined the

actress playing Felicity. She addresses Birdboot as Simon so here we

have a critic treated as a character by another character after whom the

critic lusts.

The way Birdboot becomes Simon mirrors the link between the two

men’s developing love-life. But there are more striking things ahead.

Birdboot now recognises – or claims to recognise – the first corpse. He

says it is Higgs, Moon’s shadow-self and superior rival. Initially Birdboot

thinks that Moon must have killed the man. However, he is then struck by

the possibility that Moon is being framed by one of the play’s characters.

21

Then comes another surprise. He (Birdboot) is shot just as he is trying to

warn Moon of the danger. Moon himself only realises this at the end and

perhaps we as audience only then do the same.

The next development is that Moon becomes Hound, the Inspector. Or at

least the character called Magnus so addresses him. Meanwhile, the other

characters start discussing the play as an artefact. Thus we have the critics

playing characters and the characters becoming critics. Even more

striking, the actor who played Hound and the actor who played Simon

have already been seen discussing the play in typical press-report

language while occupying the critics’ seats.

On a literal level there is motivation for Birdboot’s murder. The character

called Simon had already said he would murder anyone who came

between him and Cynthia. Moon, however, has a different slant on things.

He says that the corpse is Mc.Coy whom Simon had tracked down,

Simon himself being the mad beggar who was insulted by Mc.Coy in

Canada. Felicity is Simon’s killer, spurred by the jealousy of a woman

scorned.

The complexities of who killed whom really depend on other

complexities of who is who. If the first corpse is Higgs, Moon at least had

a motive to kill him. Higgs is a threat to him. He seems to haunt him, and

under him Moon’s genius is rebuked. On the other hand, if the corpse is

Mc.Coy, Moon has no motive. This of course leaves aside the faint

possibility that Higgs and Mc.Coy are actually the same person. If the

madman is seen as Moon disguised, then Moon has a double motive. He

hated Mc.Coy and he also hates Higgs.

22

Deliberately, there are flaws here in the apparent logic but the basic

propositions are clear. Mc.Coy may be Higgs. Simon Gascoyne may be

the mad beggar. Equally Moon may be the mad beggar and either he or

Simon could have killed the corpse. One could almost argue that the body

is two people. Simon killed him as Mc.Coy and Moon (who is now also

Hound) killed him as Higgs. Magnus meanwhile points out that we only

have Hound’s word that Simon was the madman. He suggests another

possibility : that the madman killed the first body, then fled and returned

later disguised as the (false) Inspector Hound.

In the face of a barrage of accusations Moon himself falters. He begins to

doubt his own credibility. He even has to deny to himself and others that

he is actually mad. Magnus’s point is that Simon recognised the corpse as

that of a man against whom Moon had a grudge. Moon therefore killed

Simon.

In the midst of all this, it is worth noting that some details do support the

various otherwise crazy theories. Simon, for instance, was never on stage

at the same time as the false Inspector Hound. Moon could indeed have

been playing that false Inspector. But so could Simon. There is even a

teasing possibility that Moon is three other characters – namely, the false

Inspector Hound, Simon and the madman.

This, however, is going too far. Simon after all is now in the audience as

a critic. Before that, Moon was in the audience while Simon was on stage.

Therefore they must be two entities. As if this were not enough, another

entity now makes its presence felt. Magnus announces that he himself is

the real Inspector Hound. Moon, however, astoundingly and disturbingly,

recognises him as Puckeridge.

23

This development (fortunately probably) is almost the last. But not quite

for Magnus also announces that he is the long-lost Albert Muldoon.

Moon meanwhile sees him as Puckeridge. He claims that Puckeridge

killed Higgs out of jealousy before trying to frame Moon. Magnus for his

part is now claiming to be Albert as well as the real Inspector but never

admits to being Puckeridge. Moon implies that Puckeridge (=Magnus) is

cunningly pretending to be Albert and Hound, so that he can hide the fact

that Moon is his real target. Here again we notice how Moon has entered

into and blended with the world of the play.

The ending of the play is Moon’s death. Magnus shoots him, nominally

because he (Moon) is trying to run away from the law. If Magnus is

Puckeridge, however, this is a false motive. The murder depends on a

battle for prominence between theatre-critics disguised as a scene in a

play.

So ends The Real Inspector Hound and one question remains. Does it

have any real significance? Stoppard himself said not – he said it was of

no more use than an ivory Mickey Mouse – but of course in its own

surreal way it does make some points. Chief among these is the fluidity of

identity and how easily it can be challenged or upset. This is a theme that

can also be seriously treated. In Jane Eyre, for instance, the water

imagery shows Jane fearing to rush down the torrent of St John Rivers’

will - she is afraid of losing her selfhood - her identity - in his current.

There is another link with Jane Eyre for in that work two identities may

be superimposed on each other. In Jane’s second watercolour picture

24

painted at Lowood she herself seems to blend with the mad Bertha

Mason. The face seems to be Jane’s yet has Bertha’s eyes and hair.

Taken overall, The Real Inspector Hound wears its serious themes lightly.

Or rather these themes themselves become material for parody. The play

is less grounded in seriousness even than The Comedy of Errors where

loss of identity is really a matter of mistaken identification. It is also far

more surreal than most other plays where acting and reality are

juxtaposed – plays such as John O’Keeffe’s Wild Oats which is also

about acting and adopted identities.

There is one other thing. Although the play features endless spirals of

possible identity, it is notable that the characters often seem to live in a

little world of their own. There is thus a double effect. On one level, there

is a latent idea that our sense of identity partly depends on how others see

us - on our relationships, and the way we are responded to in public. On

the other, we all have a certain core of selfhood. Perhaps indeed a loss of

a sense of this is itself a kind of death. The Real Inspector Hound ends

with a (comically treated) death. It is as if Moon cannot survive with his

identity and position so much under threat. Stoppard here moves away

from traditional comedy endings. Usually, confusion becomes harmony.

Sorrow in separation yields to joy in loving reunion. Here all is death and

loss – though paradoxically Moon seems almost to admire Puckeridge’s

ingenuity and his death is treated in a more comical than sinister way.

* * * * *

25

26

The Real Inspector Hound :

The play uses multiple identity to create confusing cross-currents. It also

takes the non-literal and makes it literal. This is a Gilbertian trick - in The

Mountebanks, the line “He’s got a way with him” is taken literally,

leading to the response “Has he got it with him now?” In Stoppard’s play

“the real Mc.Coy” is similarly treated. The phrase generally means “the

genuine article”. But Mc.Coy here is taken as a character within the play

or possibly as a false identity of Moon.

What really happens in the play is impossible to ascertain with any

certainty. There are blended possibilities. The general consensus is :

- Moon is Mc.Coy and is also the False Hound. He kills the man

who insulted him. Simon realises this, so Moon kills him too but in his

(Simon’s) Birdbolt manifestation. To put it another way, Moon gets in

initially disguised as Hound but he is a fake. He kills Higgs, the man who

insulted him. Then he kills Birdbolt in his guise as Simon, from whom

Birdbolt has taken over.

- Magnus is Puckeridge. He disposes of his rivals in the newspaper

business - the senior Stringers. The first corpse is Higgs. Then in the end

he contrives to remove Moon too. He has already killed Birdbolt because

Birdbolt was trying to warn Moon that he was in danger.)

There is further confusion, however, because it cannot be certain who the

Madman is and whether Higgs is really Higgs or could be Mac.Coy. If

Moon is Mc.Coy he is a killer. But by one interpretation Mc.Coy is the

first victim.

27

According to which scenario you go by Moon is both victim and killer.

Magnus, as we shall see, is also both the good Inspector Hound and

Puckeridge, the killer.

Other points : (a) Fairly clear ones.

- The real Hound doubles with Magnus and Albert.

- Birdbolt doubles with Simon.

- Magnus is the real Inspector Hound but he is also Puckeridge,

Moon’s Deputy (3rd

Stringer), ambitiously keen to oust him. As so

often, the play-world and the world of the audience-critics blend and

create cross-currents.

(b) Ambiguous ones :

The ambiguities lie partly in who exactly is the Madman and partly in

whether the first corpse is Higgs or Mc.Coy or indeed Mc.Coy who later

took on the Higgs identity, so is both. There are the following

possibilities :

- Moon killed Higgs and then (as the false Inspector Hound) killed

Birdbolt to try to stop him revealing the truth about this first murder.

28

- The Madman was Simon and he killed Mc.Coy. Mc.Coy here is Higgs.

The Madman was then replaced by Birdbolt who was killed too.

- Magnus is Puckeridge and is also the Real Inspector Hound. One

scenario (voiced by Moon) is that he (Puckeridge) killed Higgs. He then

killed Birdbolt. This was because Birdbolt knew of his dark deeds and

had been trying to warn Moon throughout.

- The Madman sought revenge on Mc.Coy and killed him. However, the

Madman’s identity is unclear. He might be Simon. He might be Moon.

Either way, Higgs is Mc.Coy in this scenario.

- If Moon is the madman, Birdbolt is killed by him because he represents

Simon. Simon Gascoyne has recognised the corpse as someone against

whom, for unknown reasons, the madman had a grudge. The motive for

the first murder is nothing to do with Mc.Coy who is more or less a

figment. The Madman simply had an unknown motive for killing the first

corpse who is Higgs. In this scenario, Simon has to be eliminated because

he knows too much. Birdbolt replaces Simon, so is killed as a proxy.

Complicating the picture is the fact that it was a Simon Gascoyne who

allegedly insulted Mc.Coy, if Mc.Coy really existed. More obviously, in

this scenario, Moon gets in initially disguised as Inspector Hound.

- One could combine the possibilities by saying that Moon kills Higgs,

and the Madman kills Mc.Coy. But there is only one initial body, so

Higgs must be Mc.Coy and Moon must be the Madman. This Madman

(who is also Moon) returns as Inspector Hound and kills Simon/Birdbolt.

29

Why The Confusions?

This is because of multiple personae. Those in the play have two

identities to start with. They have their identities as actors and actresses

and identities as their characters. (This is a device also used in The Grand

Duke, which also incidentally features Roulette, as does this play.)

Confusions arise when the acted part (the character) becomes involved in

a scenario relating to the performer, and vice-versa. The character is

treated as the performer (and vice-versa) while simultaneously being

treated as the character (and vice-versa). The two worlds collide and/or

penetrate each other.

There is also the world of the audience and the critics. The critics both

comment on the play and become part of it. They may also know/relate to

the play-characters in their real identity as people outside the play (actors

and actresses, rather than characters). By the time they enter the play-

world, they are relating to the actors both as real people and as characters.

Altogether, there is a dizzying spiral of identities and false identities.

Each part played is like a string woven into a complex tangle, sometimes

with multiple divided threads. Hence the idea of a “Stringer” seems

specially appropriate.

- - - - - - - - -