following short essay
n the following short essay (which you can read on page 1176 of your text), Linda Durai writes about the repetition and the stage directions in The Real Inspector Hound and argues that these elements make it a play that is better appreciated when read than when seen in a theater. Consider this essay as an example of good student work that needs to be edited in order to correct some common errors and enhance its effect. As you read it, note what works well and what could be improved. Notice, on the positive side, that the thesis is significant—beyond what anyone would simply agree on about the play. The author supports her thesis with specific evidence, quoting accurately from the text. She strengthens her argument by acknowledging other perspectives—as when she notes that some of the humor of the play would work better in a performance than on the page.
What other positive qualities can you observe in Durai’s essay? How might you revise it to make it even stronger? For example, could she organize her essay differently?
Are there places in the essay that could be clearer and more focused? How might you edit Durai’s choices of words or the structure of her sentences to be more precise or economical? Like many student essays, this one has a few common errors that are easy to catch on rereading. Can you find where the antecedent or reference for a pronoun is unclear? Can you locate where a plural pronoun is used for a singular subject (the number should be consistent)? Are there any incomplete sentences?
Linda Duari
Professor Ridgeway
English 282
Date
Reading a “Whodunnit?”: Stage Directions and Repetition in The Real Inspector Hound Comment by jennifer.heinert: Effective two-part title
Most plays have stage directions to guide the director and actors as well as readers. Comedies use repetition to make the audience laugh. Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) uses both stage directions and repetition in unusual and funny ways. In this play, different kinds of stage directions add to the humor, usually with repetitions that don’t seem to make sense. Further, the stage directions go beyond what is necessary for performing the play. Some of the italicized words crack jokes for the reader, and sometimes what would usually be in the printed script is spoken aloud by characters. One of the characters, Mrs. Drudge, is a major source of this ridiculous repetition, as to what she says and the stage directions of what she does. The Real Inspector Hound is a really complicated play that needs to be read again and again to be fully understood. A reader can reread and compare the stage directions that connect the murder mystery at Muldoon Manor with the play about the theater critics Moon and Birdboot. Comment by jennifer.heinert: This is where a thesis statement should be: The writer does not ever focus to a clear thesis that encompasses the entire essay. Some of these sentences are not arguments and could be cut from the essay entirely.Keep this in mind as you read the rest of the essay: what should the thesis be? Is there another sentence that the author might move here?
The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, and it also makes fun of theater critics and plays that have a “play-within-the-play” (Ridgeway, Hodgson, Stoppard, “Conversation”). This is a device that Shakespeare used in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Ridgeway). A frame and an inner play usually mirror each other, with comic results. The printed play of The Real Inspector Hound makes it more obvious that there is a frame or a mirroring of an inside and an outside play. This is something that you wouldn’t notice in a theater. It begins with several paragraphs in italics that no one in the theater would read. What a live audience would see is something like “their own reflection.” Stoppard’s note declares: “Impossible” (1395); no mirror could really reflect everyone sitting in the actual seats. The reader knows that Stoppard describes the set of the play-within-the-play as a realistic drawing room, and knows that Stoppard instructs directors to cast two different types, “plumpish middle-aged Birdboot and younger taller, less-relaxed Moon” (1395). Theatergoers would probably be slower to realize that this play is not going to proceed like other plays do, though they would know the play has started, whereas the reader sees continuing stage directions. Comment by jennifer.heinert: This might work as a potential thesis… Comment by jennifer.heinert: While the author is making good points, the execution is not academic: it is probably too informal for the purpose of the essay and reads more like a rough draft. It sounds more like something someone would say and not write. Comment by jennifer.heinert: The author has a habit of using unclear antecedents—what are “this,” “they,” “you,” and “it” throughout the essay? These vague word usages need revision.
Alone on stage, Moon follows directions that Stoppard drags out to entertain the reader; it could be summarized “Moon stares around the stage for several minutes and then reads the program cover to cover.” Instead the prose is dramatic: “Silence. The room. The body. MOON… He turns over the page and reads… Pause. MOON picks up his programme… Pause …” I count seven sentences that tell us how Moon reads the program. When performed, this would make the audience impatient like Moon, and laugh at seeing him act the way they might feel. But it is also a funny imitation of a reader reading the play and waiting to find out the plot. We feel like Birdboot objecting when Moon says the play has started with a pause, “You can’t start with a pause!” (1396). That’s already a joke about the kind of experimental theater that Stoppard writes.
There are many “straight” stage directions not meant for laughs. These help the reader put themselves in the place of actors, directors, and crew. I can’t note all of the fun effects here. But Moon and Birdboot are always talking over and over about the same themes, Moon about his jealousy of the lead reviewer and wanting to murder him, Birdboot about his affairs and his lusting after actresses. There are lots of jokes about the way the two reviewers see the same thing differently, one very intellectual and fancy and the other crude or vulgar. It’s interesting that most of the dialogue directions are about Birdboot, who is always shifting his tone to keep up appearances: “conspiratorially,” “suspiciously,” “instantly outraged,” “urbanely.” His repeated loud chewing on chocolates would be funnier onstage. But the reader can enjoy the stage-direction descriptions, and only a reader knows that Stoppard thinks Birdboot “grasps reality in the form of his box of chocolates” (1397). The audience would just see him as a lover of candy, a kind of big baby, and he even uses baby talk to his wife.
Besides the beginning with a “pause,” the play has a bunch of jokes, out loud and in the written play, about stage directions, programs, and exposition—information that you might find in a program or printed stage directions. Many of these jokes are around Mrs. Drudge, who is always repeating things in a crazy overdone way. We read that “the char” comes in to dust the room “on the trot,” giving a very English picture of a servant (familiar from lots of comedies and farces). And then Moon reads out loud from the program: “Mrs. Drudge the Help”—a little like labeling her Mrs. Clean the Maid, to be really sure everyone gets it. Her job is obviously to “help” the play, doing the chores of getting information across and making the audience laugh because she doesn’t see what the audience sees. It’s like a game where she’s blind-folded and can’t see the corpse and the suspicious intruder. She is the one who turns on the radio announcement that sounds like a warning in an old scary movie. And she is the one who answers the phone by saying aloud the information about the scene, what ought to be in the program. It’s especially funny to read what is happening while Mrs. Drudge keeps waiting for the sound technician to make the phone ring. Her answer makes no sense only as a parody of stage directions: “Hello, the drawing-room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring?” Most of Mrs. Drudge’s speeches rattle off the background about all the people and the time and place of the play that is happening on the stage. Sometimes they sound like a silly idea of the country life: “now that the cuckoobeard is in bud” (1400). Comment by jennifer.heinert: Another example of tone issues—what other ones do you identify? How might these be revised and made more formal?
The play gets incredibly ridiculous as things repeat more and more. Especially with the repeating of Mrs. Drudge’s stage business and speeches. She is the center of several scenes that seem to go nowhere, especially in the episode where she serves coffee (beginning of “act two”). Again she seems to ask the person on the telephone what would actually be the information about the next scene: “the same, half an hour later?” (1409). Then she sets up a silly round of asking characters how they take their coffee. Stoppard winks at the reader by first spelling it all out and then getting impatient: “[Mrs. Drudge pours.]” becomes “[Ditto.]” and so on through cream, sugar, and starting to offer biscuits. Birdboot writes a note out loud about how dull the beginning of the second act is, and Felicity jumps up and says, “If you ask me, there’s something funny going on.” This is a double irony that is easier to catch on paper because you can stop and read it again. That is, if Mrs. Drudge asks her about a biscuit, it’s ridiculous, and Felicity thinks there’s something suspicious like a crime going on. This meaning comes out when Felicity turns on the radio so the warning is broadcast again. Felicity is another character type, the romantic leading lady, as much as Mrs. Drudge is the type of a wise servant, and she also mostly repeats what ever she says or does, including her threats to kill Simon Gascoyne. A lot of times Mrs. Drudge happens to come onstage “in time to overhear” such remarks.
There are scenes that repeat as if the actors have gotten stuck in the first act, and the stage directions seem to be aware of this. When “[a tennis ball bounces in through the french windows, followed by FELICITY … ],” for the second time, things are a little different because Birdboot is onstage. The stage directions make a big deal of the idea that the scene is being acted over again: “as before. … The lighting is as it was. Everything is as it was. It is, let us say, the same moment in time.”] (1416). The last two sentences just can’t be staged. Stoppard seems to be talking to us as readers. We can turn back the pages to check that the words are almost identical, and that the actress who plays Felicity says her lines the same no matter which man is playing “Simon.”
The inner play is obviously a “whodunnit” or murder mystery. It is also a farce, a kind of play with lots of coincidences, running in and out of entrances, disguises, and funny repetitions and discoveries that get people in trouble. The whole play depends on physical situation, the kind of thing viewers see, even though a character like Mrs. Drudge ignores it. But at the same time it involves puns and wordplay, also noticed by the audience while the characters may not be aware. The audience and readers are going to enjoy the way the Moon’s long speeches about theater are also comments by the playwright about his own work. Although some actions, for instance the two times that Magnus runs over characters in a wheelchair, are probably funnier live than reading about it, other repetitions are going to be more obvious to a reader than if we were watching in a real theater. I think the stage directions make all the repetitions in The Real Inspector Hound funnier than they would be in performance. As a parody of all sorts of theater conventions, it is a play that should be read and reread. Comment by jennifer.heinert: Did you discover a thesis statement in the essay? If so, did the author support and prove it? How does the conclusion align with the introduction and body paragraphs?
