For her directorial debut, director Heather Dunkin has chosen a short but ambitious work in Pentacle’s new play, “The Real Inspector Hound.”
To describe the play as an Agatha Christie spoof, or madcap send-up of the parlor mystery genre is to omit important elements. That description is accurate, but only just. And the sort of entertainment that description calls to mind; light, easy, and silly-funny, is way off.
“The Real Inspector Hound” is a play within a play. It marries Algonquin Round Table verbals, dry and droll, with the broader strokes of ironic screwball comedy, the product of the union being neither.
We join stage critics Moon and Birdboot as they settle in to watch a whodunit mystery, which we are also watching. The two critics are each as lost in their own contemplations as they are in the play. Birdboot is delightfully contemplating adultery with one of the play’s actresses and Moon is caught up in the existential angst of being a second string reviewer.
Moon is played with the trademark insecurity of Rob Sim. Sim has been called upon to be thin, tightly wound and worried in many Pentacle productions, but has never been the same man twice. Birdboot is played by Tom Wrosch, all joyous appetites and lusts. There is at least one corpse on the floor throughout the evening, which, depending on interpretation is either completely inconsequential or a figure of the highest symbolism.
It can’t be simple to be good at being awful, and the Pentacle cast does it well. All the familiar faces of a proper mystery are there in the English parlor. The rich, hot-blooded widow (Lori Vandreal-Clark) who still looks out onto the impassable swamps to see the return of her years-gone husband, the young simpering ingénue (Darcie Chin), and the handsome young man with entanglements to both (Robert Salberg). Fred Allen is Major Muldoon, a never before seen relation in a bad mustache whose arrival coincides with a police force search of an escaped lunatic. Ben Tate, appearing as Inspector Hound, may be that police force, but who can tell for sure in such a murky maze of mystery?
Robynn Hayek is the comic anchor and is extremely well suited to the role of the maid Mrs. Drudge. Hayek has considerable mastery over her facial muscles and body language, silently creating laughter and chaos just by walking across the stage.
The bad play progresses inside the smart play, until the incessant ring of a telephone turns everything inside out. Maybe there was an escaped madman, or maybe he never got away at all. The smart surrealism Stoppard is famous for begins to swirl around the theater, depositing all the viewers, scripted and non, in a different spot than where they started.
“The Real Inspector Hound” is madcap mystery spoof, but not in the manner of the movie Clue or Murder by Death. It is madcap in the very individual manner of Tom Stoppard, its playwright.
Stoppard is best known for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” His stiff backed humor is at the center of layered dialog and educated absurdity. “The Real Inspector Hound” is like New Yorker cartoons, where many laugh themselves sick and many just don’t see it. It could be said that Stoppard’s comedy is more clever than funny, and that, especially in the case of Pentacle’s newest play, is not a bad thing.
“The Real Inspector Hound” runs through May 8th. For tickets and information contact Pentacle at www.pentacletheatre.org or 503-485-4300.
