Are you ready for our final book club of the year? Well, ready or not here we go to cap off another year of reading and discussing together!
The Real Inspector Hound is a quick, funny play where Tom Stoppard takes aim at theatre, critics, reality, and fate. While its one act zips by in 50 pages or less, it still manages to have opinions about our place in the world around us.
Ground rules remain the same as before, discuss in the comments below, try to respond directly to someone’s ideas as suits your own ponderings, and refer to the numbered topics below by number, please, to help people find the conversation topics they are looking for.
In addition to the topics below I’ve saved a few for our Facebook group, Cannonball Read Book Chat so feel free to wander over there throughout the course of the day.
On to the topics:
- The New York Times called this play “a swipe at the enemy”. How do you feel about that categorization?
- What are your expectations when you see/read a comedy? How does “Hound” satisfy them (or not)? If you’ve watched the play, what affects did the creative choices have for you as a viewer?
- How does the presence of the body define this play?
- In the introduction to my copy of the play (Tom Stoppard: Plays 1) Stoppard discusses that the plot point that made the play most worth writing was the revelation around Higgs. What is your interpretation of this artistic statement?
- How does the theme of “not seeing” relate to the work (in the setting and the dramatic action)?
- The structural frame of the play is Birdboot and Moon interjecting between scenes, as critics, Birdboot and Moon consider themselves to be outside and above the action of the play. How does their relationship with the play onstage and each other change?
- What is reality and what is not?
- In what ways does the play address notions of fate and free will?
Well, what say you?
Q1. I think it was definitely a “swipe at the enemy” if you consider thoughtless critics the enemy. Moon and Birdboot are never interested in the play for it’s own sake. Birdboot seems to be a critic only for the access it gives him to pretty young actresses and Moon has delusions of himself as a respected and renowned critic/writer. I think this was a great choice for Cannonballer discussion. We aren’t professional critics, but I identified with putting myself in my reviews the way Moon and Birdboot put themselves in the play. I am not an author or artist, but I can imagine there is a tension between what the writer wants to convey and how the reader is interpreting the words.
My first laugh out loud moment of the play was when Moon and Birdfoot start analyzing the play with their puffed up, empty language that surrounds so much of establishment artistic critique. Perhaps its just the world I live in, but I’ve found that the “stuffed shirts” that were leading the critical conversation even 20 years ago simply aren’t anymore as the internet has opened up to more professional voices, and the more amateur critic such as ourselves.
It’s kind of the greatest that they repeatedly split the hair of “élan/éclat,” amiright?
I agree. The internet, for better or worse, has demystified criticism.
I just made this point in our Facebook conversation, too, but wouldn’t you say that “the enemy” is not only selfish lazy critics, but also useless lazy playwrights? Stoppard is arguing that plays MUST have substance – we ALL must have substance! – otherwise, we are just wasting space.
True! I’m also in the process of reviewing Anthony Horowitz’ Magpie Murders in which he takes swipes at the publishing industry, whodunnits, the lazy consuming public, and the writers who, like himself, feed the beast.
Ooh, I like the sound of that!
While I was reading I didn’t think Stoppard was taking a view of one side as the enemy, moreover, that attention must be paid and things must be of merit. It is as much a call to arms as anything which the NYT might make sound more sinister.
I totally agree with the idea that the reader/reviewer can’t help but per herself in the story, at least sometimes. When Moon was saying “I’m almost sure I’m not mad…” towards the end, I was thinking of how a book will get all the stars on Amazon, or rave reviews on Goodreads, and then a bunch of Cannonballers will read it and say “What?!? This was wretched!” Even if you think you have a good grasp on a story or whatever, there’s no telling what a different audience member might take away from it.
How about this
Q3. I mean. If you’re not allowed to introduce a gun in the first act without firing it at the show’s climax, you certainly can’t introduce a dead body when the lights come up without the play turning on it, can you? Talking about upping the stakes…!
The most wonderfully perverse thing about it is that you never find out who really killed Higgs or Simon/Birdboot.
Well, and also they aren’t actually dead, are they, if they’ve just swapped places with the critics? It’s the old “and then Hamlet came and took a bow, so I knew theater isn’t real” joke, twisted inside out.
Wait, is Higgs not dead? I thought Higgs was dead. Am I giving away that I didn’t actually watch the lovely production we linked to?
Is ANYONE dead?
Like in all of space and time? Probably not. :)
I’m pretty sure Higgs is actually dead, and then Birdboot and Moon. We know the critics aren’t particularly good actors, after all!
Birdboot and Moon are definitely dead. We just aren’t sure who they actually are.
Are they definitely dead? Or, having discovered that they also are actors in The Play or A Play or we all are or no one is, is it possible that they also have a third act waiting for them in which they will take on new roles already, just as Simon and Hound could do?
I don’t think we know who anyone in the play is at all, making the “real” in the title a red herring. Its a similar play on words to “Absolutely True” in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian
Q4. I think relates directly to Q1 and Q3: I think Stoppard *really* wanted some dead critics in this play, and I think he *really* wanted to make a dumb comedy with obscenely high stakes. He makes his own fun.
I thought it was interesting that he called this play “timeless…in the most perjorative sense.” He is making his own fun with and at the conventions of the whodunnit, but also has had the last word on the lazy writer, consumer, and critic.
The whole thing could have been an episode of Midsommer Murders.
Amazing!
Crap, I thought this was tomorrow for some reason! My copy came in from ILL yesterday, so I guess I’ll have to read it tonight when I get home and hope some discussion is still going on.
It’s a delight!
It’ll go quick and it’s really good!
Well, I read it, and now I am confused. My head hurts and is not used to meta anymore.
Q8. I love this question! And to answer it, I want to flag the moment when Birdboot is playing the role of Simon, and he leaps out of the way for Magnus’ entrance to avoid getting run over, and gets run over because Magnus barrels in from the next wing down. First of all: hilarious. Second of all: I think there’s an argument in the play that being self-centered is what’s going to take you down in the end… you have to participate, listen, observe, engage in order to do anything properly in this world/society. Don’t be a Birdboot, just thinking about yourself; look for the wheelchair.
“Don’t be a Birdboot”. YES. And Moon really is no better.
I threw this topic in at the end because I really felt the characters being pulled into the maelstrom of events. They had made all of these choices that had led them to this moment, but without Higgs’ dead body on stage, there’s no reason for Moon to be there miscommunicating with Birdboot.
Q4 is the one I want at the most I think, and it links back to Q8, that Stoppard, in his own words, just had pieces of something until he decided that Higgs was the dead body, and that there was a dead body lurking on stage. Once that is in place, we are locked into a series of events.
Q7 – just what IS real? Who IS the Real Inspector Hound anyway? Is it the actor who comes on stage and then takes Moon’s seat (in the video, the one with the weird boots)? Magnus says he’s the real one, but then he turns out to be Albert after all.
I felt a little like some of that was baiting would be intellectuals more than it was a deep exploration of identity and reality. I thought there were some deliberate allusions to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I don’t know what the response was like when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead first opened, but it was certainly popular for students to link WfG and R&G are Dead when I was a drama student. It wouldn’t surprise me if Stoppard was poking fun.
OMG, yes, I got total vibes from this of him poking fun at Waiting for Godot, especially at the beginning with all the “Where is Higgs?” nonsense, and it not seeming to lead anywhere or signify anything.
Q4: This seems like it’s the center the play pivots on. The fact that Higgs is the dead body all along, and no one sees it’s him, and he’s this supposed important critic . . . like the #1 critic. Well, it brings to mind the phrase “God is dead”, except in this case, the critic is dead, but the play goes on around him. He is unnamed, and his dead body figures in the fictional narrative, but his actual name, his profession, and actual circumstances of death don’t seem to matter. If we’re taking this play as “a swipe at the enemy,” then the inverse of that is that is that art functions separately from critics, that for the purposes of the art itself, the critic is dead, and he/she doesn’t affect it.
What that means on a larger scale, I have no idea, but it’s certainly a striking image.
Also, Stoppard could just be fucking with everyone.
I feel like he is both fucking with everyone and very carefully critiquing the ever loving shit out of existence, while just having a go at a dead body on stage.