The Real Inspector Hound

Though he’s now known as one of the most brilliant stage writers of the modern age, Stoppard preceded his playwriting career with stints as a theater critic (inverting the usual trope of critics as failed playwrights). In Hound, his 1968 metatheatrical one-act farce, his theater-critic characters prove he picked up a few things from his colleagues, including their facility for bloviation, pretension and the deployment of empty cliché. Moon and Birdboot, the two reviewers who watch, comment on and eventually enter into the play within Stoppard’s play, confirm a playwright’s fantasy about the critical profession: With their written opinions driven by libido or envy rather than honest assessment, they’ve determined their conclusions before the play begins. As performed by Philip Winston and Jon Steinhagen, these petty scribes are delightfully boorish, self-serving pretenders.

Unfortunately, the play-within drags to a crawl in Marra’s production. Hound’s internal pageant is intentionally creaky, an English-manor murder mystery that parodies the likes of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Though the London Mousetrap has been running continuously for 58 years, Christie-style whodunits aren’t much in vogue stateside these days. Thus neither Stoppard’s tweaking of genre-standard red herrings nor his once-innovative crash through the fourth wall feels very fresh. And Marra has his actors overplay every bit, wringing the energy from the stage in their overindulgence. What ought to be brisk is instead a real slog.

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