An Investigation of Stoppard's "Hound" and "Foot"

An Investigation of Stoppard's "Hound" and "Foot" BRIAN M. CROSSLEY ... All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never been anything but thrillers. Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about. Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion. Victims ofDuty! IT IS the parodic and satirically self-referential quality of Tom Stoppard's plays that sets him apart from the luvenalian playwrights of the fifties. Whereas Osborne uses anger as a means of attack upon the world, Stoppard remains the theatrical critic and aims his derision at the mores of drama, and especially at the age-old detective figure of Sophocles' Oedipus . Turning the tradition against itself is the main thrust of his aesthetic attack. Using the modern preoccupation with absurdity and Angst, he strikes home at such figures as T.S. Eliot and his "overwhelming question," which is not to be asked, which one dare not ask, for perhaps there is no answer or only such an answer as it would be better not to know. Stoppard makes game of these notions by the old theatrical trick of inverting them. Throughout his plays the serious forms of the dramatized detective story are reduced to cartoon-like scenes which humorously strip away the conventions on which they are founded. Even the highly visual comic effects appear to mock both blindjustice and the Oedipus myth. Questions of recognition and reality provide the central mystery of The Real Inspector Hound. In terms of the detective story, the title ap77 78 BRIAN M. CROSSLEY pears to make it plain what this work is to be about. The sleuth as a kind of "bloodhound" is a hunting phrase long since ridden to death. Yet beyond this cliche is the title's ambiguous suggestion of an inspector who is, somehow, not real. By creating a play-within-a-play, Stoppard produces a kind of double vision which challenges the validity of the real itself . Whatever the play's classical antecedents, as a parody of the murder-mystery form, The Real Inspector Hound finds its target in a contemporary play, that most famous of all stage whodunits, Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. Stoppard's work parallels this popular play at virtually all its crucial points. For example, we are invited to discover "who done it?" only to find that the detective plays two roles, sleuth and slayer. The situation is further complicated in Stoppard's version by the dual roles of Moon and Birdboot as audience and players. And in the travesty of an ending, the order-bringing figure of the detective unleashes bloody anarchy on both the innocent and the guilty. As lame ducks, Moon and Birdboot are shot down with the kind of relish found mainly in fairground shooting galleries. Stoppard repeatedly sets up the standard classical thriller situations with the deliberate intention of knocking them down. For example, the action of the play takes place in an isolated country house. Mrs. Drudge, the servant, in answering the telephone summarizes the play and a thousand others like it: Hello, the drawing-room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring? ... Hello! - the draw - Who? Who did you wish to speak to? I'm afraid there is no one of that name here, this is all very mysterious and I'm sure it's leading up to something, I hope nothing is amiss for we, that is Lady Muldoon and her houseguests, are here cut off from the world, including Magnus, the wheelchair-ridden half-brother of her ladyship's husband Lord Albert Muldoon who ten years ago went out for a walk on the cliffs and was never seen again2 Added to this scene, with its convenient French window, are an unexpected guest (the cad Simon), an all-enveloping mist, and a police message over the radio. Apart from the pseudo-serious tone of the announcement , the call emphasizes terminal situations, death and lunacy, all of which are undercut by the final, incongruous use of the word "madman" and the ridiculous appeal to his reason: Essex county police are still searching in vain for...