Spoof Sleuths, Nix Crix

By T.E.K.

THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND and AFTER MAGRITTE

by TOM STOPPARD

Drama has an affinity for detection. Almost every play has elements of mystery and surprise. It is like a nest of clues that must be woven together in the course of an evening to reveal some final, unified meaning.

This dramatic aspect of riddle solving seems to have a special appeal for British Playwright Tom Stoppard. Much of his first play, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern Are Dead, had those two pitiably bewildered title characters trying to figure out what the devil was going on in the castle at Elsinore. His new playlets are dramatic trifles compared to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the longer and better one, The Real Inspector Hound, is highly diverting. (The brief curtain raiser, After Magritte, simply reduces the deductive process to a bundle of false clues that turn the characters, as well as the lines, into absurdist non sequiturs.)

Hound's action takes place in a theater on opening night. It is a spoof of an Agatha Christie thriller, and Stoppard handles it with prankish zest, though it lacks the urbane comic polish and spine-prickling tremors that Anthony Shaffer put into his Christie takeoff, Sleuth. The subplot concerns two drama critics who observe and comment on the play and eventually get actively drawn into it at no small risk. Here Stoppard is sly and wry, and one may guess that he views critics with bemused affection and subdued contempt.

He makes each man a very different type, and he is wickedly on target with both. Birdboot (Tom Lacy) is an expansive, chocolate-munching show-bird chaser who finds almost everything "a rattling good show." Moon (David Rounds) is an emotionally constipated, intellectually rabid exegete; any wispy pile of dramatic dandruff can fuel his fire about "the human condition."

As a second-string critic, Moon occupies a theatrical purgatory. A few years ago during the presidency of L.B.J., Dan Sullivan, then second-stringer to Clive Barnes on the New York Times, was sent to Washington, D.C., to cover a play. Stewart Udall, then Secretary of the Interior, passed Sullivan on the aisle, and asked the perennial question, "Where's Barnes?" Retorted Sullivan, in what has become the classic second-stringer's revenge, "Where's Johnson?" Though this has an element of the private joke, Lacy and Rounds are so humanly right in their roles that they suggest similar foibles in any number of other men in other professions. The woman who casts delight on the evening is Carrie Nye. Too long absent from the New York stage, she confers not only her blonde good looks on both plays, but what too many other actresses neglect to cultivate: a crystal voice and a queenly bearing.--T.E.K.

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