Stage Directions in The Real Inspector Hound by Charmaine Yik

Stage Directions in The Real Inspector Hound

In his self-referential play-within-a-play The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard deals with reality and imaginative reality in life and art, and their interconnectedness. With artful manipulation of stage directions, Stoppard plays with atmosphere, settings and visual impact, bringing across the foundation of the play’s themes and structure, before applying layers dialogue that subverts, bewilders and makes us question the reliability of what we are watching. Detailed analysis of stage directions is thus essential in giving us a better appreciation of what the play attempts to put across.

The opening stage directions demand the mirroring of theatregoer’s seating area. While difficult to accomplish onstage physically (Stoppard’s scene design on the acting edition located the critics at stage left—which means that the visual distinction between the critics’ world and the play-within-a-play is obscured, and the audience would thus have lost part of the significance), it is essential to note Stoppard’s original intention to disorient viewers with their own reflection, breaking down conventional theatregoing boundaries of actors and audience as separate entities. We are made aware that reality parallels illusion, and that we as audience are part of this illusion as well.

Other themes are brought to light with through deliberate creation and undermining of atmosphere. Stoppard parodies Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles by naming his inspector “Hound” and having “mournful baying hooting” noises herald his arrival. The visual impact created by the bizarre appearance of the first Inspector Hound—“swamp boots”, “inflated pontoons with bottoms about two feet across” and “foghorn”—instantly undermines his credibility as a serious law enforcer. Wickedly melodramatic and comical, Stoppard’s caricatures express an innate distrust of reason and empirical method in achieving some form of understanding. Puckeridge as the real Inspector Hound and the mastermind behind the murders upsets the entire system of order, further challenging the reliability of reason and science in maintaining order and policing civilisation.

“When confronted by the fact of death, all the world is distinctly not a stage… nothing calls attention to the gulf between reality and the realm of imaginative reality so sharply as the fact of death.” Paul Delaney, Tom Stoppard—The Moral Vision of the Major Plays

With his strategic positioning of the corpse in the opening of the play—(The BODY of a man lies sprawled face down on the floor in front of a large settee… Silence. The room. The BODY. MOON.) and again, (They look at it. The room. The BODY. Silence.) and repeated reminders throughout the play—(She does not see the body/ He does not see the body) the corpse not only provides a genre—“It’s a whodunit, man!”, it effectively builds suspense amid melodrama and comedy, and also plays an essential role in defining structure and, later on, resolution. The body as a mere ‘prop’ determinedly missed by the characters in the beginning of the play-within-a-play takes on a immense significance with the revelation of his real identity as Higgs the critic, Moon’s superior, and acts as a bridge to connect the ‘real’ and ‘illusionary’ worlds within the play. With this “real death” the play-within-a-play is no longer an illusion: Moon is quickly implicated and the atmosphere swings rapidly into one of increasing paranoia and extreme urgency in the need to unveil the true murderer. Had the stage direction not left such obvious clues regarding the presence of the body from the very beginning, the significant link would have been lost.

The stage directions also draw attention to the artificiality of the play:
(Perfunctory applause)
(Mrs Drudge seems to have been waiting for (the phone) to (ring) and for the last few seconds has been dusting it with an intense concentration.)
Another instance requires Cynthia to appear immediately after her tennis game, in her cocktail dress with her hair properly done, which is notably unrealistic given the limited lime lapse. Besides evoking visual humour, such stage directions make it very clear that the play is very aware of itself as a play. It is interesting to note, however, that the really urgent moments in The Real Inspector Hound are detached from their surrounding theatrical artifice—Birdboot’s discovery of the identity of the body and Moon’s entrance onstage immediately after Birdboot is shot occurs only when the characters of the play-within-a-play are offstage. The collision of the real and fantasy world in the one moment when there is a break in the plotline leaves a much more powerful impact upon the common unreflective audience and draws parallels in the complexities of human experience.

Melodrama, clichés and comedy within the stage directions continually undermine the seriousness of the issues at stake. Swinging deliberately between painfully obvious statements and hilarious understatements:
Immediately after the radio report: (He is acting suspiciously. He creeps in. He creeps out.)
(Fearful gasp from Mrs Drudge)
(Cynthia breaks away dramatically)
After Cynthia’s threat of killing Simon: (Pregnant with significance)
—even at potentially disturbing moments, Stoppard uses laughter to disarm, putting aside our unease until the final, fatal inversion towards the end. In contrast to the baffling dialogue that sometimes lapses into nonsensical banter, Stoppard’s stage directions remain almost conventional, with “standard” setting and “suspicious” suspects, true to the melodramatic nature of many thrillers, lulling the audience into a false sense of security at the familiarity of the actions. Yet once the audience have been effectively distanced by laughter, the story is abruptly flipped, as the farcical, almost perfunctory stage directions switches to genuine alarm on the critics’ part. Our building expectations are undermined; our objective perspectives blurred, as stability is removed and the boundary between onstage and offstage happenings is blurred, and we realise that the entire illusion might well be part of our reality. Witty visual comedy supports witty verbal comedy in bringing out salient concerns: Is the relationship between life and dramatic art, appearance and reality much closer than we choose to believe? Is language more a weakness than a strength in human communication? Is reason and science truly dependable in ordering civilisation? Are our lives condemned to a self-destructive stasis?

Bewildering twists in plot and layered meanings in word play and dialogue characteristic in The Real Inspector Hound might continually subvert and complicate our perspectives, thus stage directions are useful in defining structure, themes and visual settings, challenging our unquestioning acceptance of the surface of things by dissolving the line that separates appearance and reality.

Bibliography:
Stoppard Tom , The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays, Grove Press, New York
Hu Stephen, Tom Stoppard’s Stagecraft, Peter Lang publishing Inc, New York
Paul Delaney, Tom Stoppard: The Moral Vision of Major Plays, The Macmillan Press Ltd
Robert Gordon, Text and Performance: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, Jumpers, and The Real Thing Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan , 1991
Gwee Li Sui, Lecture notes, Stoppard: The Text
Gwee Li Sui, Lecture notes, Stoppard: The Stage


Done by: Yik Sin Yee Charmaine

Parallel existentialism and illusion vs reality in the real inspector hound...by i-mei

In a universe suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger.His is an irremediable exile…this divorce between man and his life,the actor and his setting,truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity…(Camus…myth of Sisyphus)…

The dichotomy between illusion and reality and the collapse of an imagined security of man’s reality is explored in a rather roundabout manner in the real inspector hound.Stoppard’s genius is evident in the way he rigs a structural farce rather intricate in design while avoiding the necessity for a truly substantial plot.It is perhaps the continual sway from a conventional plot and the blurring of distinction between the stageplay and the reader’s audience world that constitutes the actual plot of hound.

From the beginning,we are introduced to a situation where there are two separate planes of existence,one being the audience which the two critics,”Moon” and “Birdboot” are a part of , and the world onstage revolving around Muldoon Manor.Stoppard evidently sets the demarcations between these separate realms as depicted by the incessant flow of chatter between Birdboot and Moon that do not interfere with the conversations and exchanges onstage in the initial stage.

For Moon and Birdboot,their conversation is within their reality and what goes on onstage is illusion.For the characters onstage,Mrs, Drudge , Cynthia , Simon , Felicity, Magnus and Hound; their ongoings in Muldoon manor is their reality though it is the audience’s illusion.Parallel existentialism can only be defined present in this play if the two planes of existence occur separately,though parallel,independent of the other ,never the two shall meet.And it is so,until a certain point in time where there’s a kink in the flow of these two parallel lines of existence.

The relevance of this to my study can also be supported by the fact that in literary drama there is the assumption of verisimilitude according to the rule of the three unities-the achievement of an illusion of reality in the audience of a stage play-requires that the action represented by a play approximate the actual conditions of the staging of the play,,they imposed the requirement of the “unity of place” and the requirement of the unity of time.These of course are optional devices left at the playwright’s discretion.Stoppard however takes away these assumptions and replaces them with a contrasting rule; the rule that there are no rules .And this is where the blurring between reality and illusion takes place.

In the play,the first point of this takes place when the phone onstage rings and Birdboot takes the call which interestingly enough is for him.The events following this is what creates the kink between the separate realities and perhaps even a time loop.

..”(Birdboot mops his brow with a handkerchief.As he turns,a tennis ball bounces through the french windows,followed by felicity,as before,in tennis outfit.The lighting is as it was.It is,let us say,the same moment of time)…”(pg 33)

Now that the phone has been brought into the picture,let us look at it in greater scrutiny.What is the role of this phone which mediates calls from a stranger asking for yet another stranger to whom Mrs Drudge gives excessive information.(pg 11),and on two other occasions within the the first part of the play until the point when hound wants to call the police and discovers that the phone lines have been cut …

Hound: Thank God I’m here-the lines have been cut!
Cynthia : you mean--?
Hound : Yes!-we’re on our own,cut off from the world and in grave danger!(pg 30)

It is then interesting to note that the crucial point of collision between the two separate realms is set into motion when the phone rings when it is supposed to have its lines cut.moreover the phone rings and the call is in fact for Birdboot,a player in a separate world.Who is the puppet master behind this phone anyway?and is the phone a device belonging to the stage sphere or the sphere of the audience or both?Perhaps what Stoppard is trying to create is the awareness that the line between illusion and reality is actually a slim and shady one if only conventions are done away with.After all,in this play it is his vision that there need not be a separation between the audience and the characters in the play and the imagined detachment can actually be transcended by common desires as depicted by the parallel character scenario of Birdboot and Simon.In their separate planes of existence thet have both been toying with Felicity (or the actress playing felicity) and now seek more gratification in Cynthia.Perhaps their common desires project them to a stage where they are interchangeable.This renders their dialogues similar even as Birdboot takes the place of Simon in the play..

Felicity(stiffly):what are you trying to say?
Simon: I love another.
Felicity: I see.
Simon: I didn’t make any promises-
I merely-
Felicity: You don’t have to say anymore-
Simon: Oh,I didn’t want to hurt you-
Felicity: Of all the nerve! (pg 16)

Felicity(stiffly):what are you trying to say?
Birdboot: I want to call it off.
Felicity: I see.
Birdboot: I didn’t promise anything-and the fact is I do have my reputation-people do talk
Felicity: You don’t have to say any more-
Birdboot: And my wife too-I don’t know how she got to hear of it,but-
Felicity: Of all the nerve! (pg.33)

The repetition in the two separate dialogues can also be attributed to the scene playing itself over again.This brings in the issue of time loops and whether real life is just a time loop repeated in a cycle.Perhaps Stoppard merely creates this supposition to enhance his deployment of upsetting the whole idea of chronology and the other conventions thus making us question the entire perception of reality and which is our reality.Reality then is whatever you allow yourself to believe.Man creates his own reality even in a world of illusion.Man’s failure to adapt to varying realities and in defining his own set of beliefs within his reality could probably lead to short-sightedness as did Birdboot in facing his premature death and in Moon being connived and manipulated in the end,for while within his reality he was dreaming of killing Higgs and being first-string,Puckeridge was already, while with more vengeance, executing his plans with the same ultimate motive.



Bibliography

Stoppard,tom , the real inspector hound and other plays,grove press,1998

Abrams m.h. , a glossary of literary terms , 7th edition , Harcourt brace college publishers,1999

Brassell,tim , tom Stoppard an assessment,the Macmillan press limited,1989

The Real Inspector HOUND

parody in the real inspector hound...by nadiah

Parody is a literary tool often used as a witty yet effective method of invoking humor. It refers to the style of intentionally copying a particular subject thus making the qualities of the original more noticeable in a way that is humorous.

The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of the whodunit titled The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie. It makes a travesty of the thriller genre itself. The parody utilized by Stoppard in The Real Inspector Hound provides effective humor of a ridiculous, hilarious and obvious kind.

However parody itself cannot stand alone as an effective method to produce the dramatic effects. It is used in conjunction with the stagecraft, furniture, the props, the choice of characters, the kind of language they used and the thriller’s tendency to convey the much-needed information to the audience blatantly. Stoppard also focuses on producing a complex and intricate comic pattern that will allow plentiful opportunities for parody. This parody of the thriller and the dramatic techniques in a typical whodunit is conveyed through the character of Mrs. Drudge. The use of coincidence to such an unbelievable extent as she turns on the radio at just the right moment to catch an important police message:

“ The phone rings. Mrs. Drudge seems to have been waiting for it to do so…”
Her conversation with the caller then provides, with ridiculous, hilarious obviousness, further information:
“I’m sure it’s leading up to something…Lady Muldoon and her house-guests, are here cut off from the world including Magnus, the wheelchair-ridden half-brother of her ladyship husband Lord Albert Muldoon who ten years ago went out for walk on the cliffs and was never seen again- and all alone, for they had no children…”

The abundance of information offered by Mrs Drudge is absolutely unnecessary and irrelevant. The fact that it was given in response to a wrong number intensifies the comic effects. Her alarm “I’m sure it’s leading up to something” helps to move the play in a direction desired by Stoppard in a superficial manner as there is no gradual building up of tension from accumulation of events. Thus this unjustified over-exaggerated coincidence makes a parody of the usage of coincidence often utilized in thrillers to such a ridiculous extent hence producing the desired comic effects.

The most comical is the method of exposition that is accomplished in old nineteenth-century style through a maid and a newcomer with the aid of a twentieth century radio. The usage of the radio represents the first and the most important source of information for the characters despite it seemingly insignificance. The telephone, on the other hand, causes the first breach of reality when Birdboot answers it later on and displaces his role from audience to actor.

Parody is also directed towards the nature of play itself. There are barely any elements recognizable and familiar by which we can identify the play as a theatrical situation. The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of theater as it goes against the conventions of a theater. One of the most important aspect in a play, which is the boundary between the audience and the character, is blurred thus reality and illusion itself is displaced. Thus there are few theatrical conventions by which the play is performed thus making it difficult for people to discern the qualities by which this play can be called a theatrical situation.

Parody is not only directed at the thriller convention but also the language in which the critics approach it. This is evident in the characters of both Moon and Birdboot. With great satirical complexity, Stoppard pokes fun not only at thrillers but at critics themselves. Stoppard makes light of their affected speech and mannerism, their self-centredness and egoistical nature, their petty pride, personal ambitions and unrelenting attempt to find some assemblage of intellectual depth in a seemingly trivial piece. Moon tries hard to portray himself as a serious and knowledgeable critic through his bombastic words which seem pompous and pretentious.

“ There are moments and I would begrudge it this, when the play, if we can call it that, and I think on balance we can, aligns itself uncompromisingly on the side of life. Je suis, it seems to be saying, ergo sum. But is that enough? I think we are entitled to ask. For what fact is this play concerned with? It is my belief that here we are concerned with what I have referred to elsewhere as the nature of identity. I think we are entitled to ask- and here one is irresistibly reminded of Voltaire’s cry ‘Voila!’ - I think we are entitled to ask- ‘ Where is God?’ (p28)”
His affected and egoistical nature is evident in this speech through the wandering syntax, name-dropping and hypocritical tone of his speech. It makes him seem pompous and makes the audience realises that he is trying too hard and going out of context in commenting the play as whatever he says is just to get an upper hand over Birdboot.

In comparison the parody of Birdboot rests on his womanizing role as a star-maker. He does not exercise professionalism and instead exerts his authority for his own personal gratification. With his eye on one of the actresses, he declares:
“All this would be for nothing were it not for a performance which I consider to be one of the summits in the range of contemporary theatre. In what is possibly the finest Cynthia since the war (p.35)
Birdboot: And should she, as a result, care to meet me over a drink, simply by way of er- thanking me…”The elevated tone is still present but the objective here is simply sexual. He is interested in Cynthia and praises her so with the underlying motive to pursue her for his personal affectations. His unjustified anger at Moon’s comments as his infidelity and superficial devotion to his wife shows him to be a hypocritical character. Through the portrayal of these two critics, Stoppard even contrives a sideswipe at the critics who have tried to analyse the influences on his work.

Thus parody is very much evident in the real Inspector Hound and through its usage Stoppard has succeeded in producing a play that is witty and thought-provoking yet entertaining and humorous as well.


Biblography

Gabbard, Lucina Paquet ,The Stoppard Plays, The Whitson Publishing Company Troy, New York, 1982

Brassel, Tim, Tom Stoppard An Assessment, The Maximilian Press Ltd, 1985

Hu Stephen, Tom Stoppard’s Stagecraft, Peter Lang publishing Inc, New York, 1989

Hayman, Ronald, Tom Stoppard, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1982



Done by Nadiah Bte Mohammed Rosley

Sir Tom Stoppard

Birdboot and Cynthia, with Mrs Drudge in the background.

Birdboot and Moon seated in the audience.

stoppard's life & character analysis of Hound....by sharon

Stoppard’s Background. His life and works.

Tom Stoppard’s life

Sir Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. His father, Eugene Straussler was a doctor and his mother Martha Straussler had Jewish ancestry. The Strausslers had another son as well. When Hitler started the historical genocide, the Holocaust, the Stoppard family had to escape to Singapore. Tomas Straussler was only two years old then. The Holocaust took the lives of many of Stoppard’s relatives. In 1941, the family (except for Stoppard’s father) moved to India and Eugene Straussler remained in Singapore to fight the Japanese. He died. Martha Straussler then married a British Army Officer Kenneth Stoppard and the family went to England.

Tom Stoppard did not attend University. At 17, he left school to begin his career as a journalist and subsequently he moved on to become a freelance writer, a critic and now, as one of the most outstanding living playwrights.

He married Jose Ingle, a nurse, in 1965 and had two sons. In 1972 he divorced Ingle, marrying Miriam Moore-Robinson, (they divorced in 1992), the owner of a pharmaceutical company. They had two sons too. He left his wife for an actress Felicity Kendal, who acted in many of his plays. In 1997, knighthood was conferred upon him for his contributions to the British theatre.

Jumpers deals with the existence of God and the nature of goodness. The main plot is based on the investigation of the murder of a philosophy professor and the protagonist, another philosophy professor, George Moore’s preparation for a symposium on “Man- good, bad or indifferent”.

Travesties questions “whether an artist has to justify himself in political terms at all”. The play includes three historical figures: James Joyce, Lenin, and Tzara who are collaborating on a production of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), with score composed by Andre Previn, reflects his concern with the situation of political dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The play was inspired by a meeting with Russian exile Viktor Fainberg.

The Real Inspector Hound was written between 1961 and 1962, initially named The Stand-ins and later, The Critics. The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of the stereotypical “whodunit” thriller (with a striking resemblance to Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap) as well as of the critics watching the play, with their personal desires and obsessions interwoven into their bombastic and pompous review of the play, all of which is ingeniously presented in a play-within-a-play form. Hound explores the seemingly uninfringeable frontier between the stage and the audience.


The Real Inspector Hound: Character analysis

In The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard makes use of many cliché and stereotypical characters to ridicule the murder mystery genre as well as the competition to rise up the journalistic hierarchy. There is Simon Gascoyne, the indispensable womanizer of the play who is later replaced (within the play’s play) by Birdboot, another philanderer who is higher up in the journalistic hierarchy than Moon and is highly conceited (to the extent of bringing colour transparencies of a whole review that he has written and showing it to Moon who pretends to be interested in it). Birdboot reveals more about his womanizing the more he tries to deny it (“are you suggesting that a man of my scrupulous integrity would trade his pen for a mess of potage?! Simply because in the course of my profession I happened to have struck up an acquaintance……” pg 17-18). Birdboot and Simon are similar in their flamboyant ways, and both of them were immediately captivated by Cynthia the moment she appears, to the point that when Birdboot takes over Simon’s place in the play in the second run, there is a parallel between Birdboot and Simon’s dialogue and thoughts.

Mrs Drudge: I have come to set up the card table, sir.
Birdboot (wildly): I can’t stay for a game of cards!
Mrs Drudge: Oh, Lady Muldoon will be disappointed.
Birdboot: You mean…you mean, she wants to meet me…?
Mrs Drudge: Oh yes, sir, I just told her and it put her in quite a tizzy.

Moon is the second- stringer in his journalistic world and is anxious to replace Higgs, to the extent of contemplating killing Higgs. He is eventually killed by his stand-in Puckeridge and dies with admiration for the murderer who got away with everything, including the object of desire, Cynthia.

Felicity Cunningham, the “trim-buttocked” young actress and Cynthia Lady Muldoon the object of desire (of the men within the play and also of the men within the play’s play) are other examples of the clichéd and formulaic characters in the play. Mrs Drudge, the charwoman of Muldoon Manor, is a highly comical character (who can clean an entire drawing room but fail to notice a corpse lying behind the settee), whose purpose in the play is to, firstly, provide all the details necessary for the audience to figure out the plot of the play and also to overhear each of the characters’ threat to kill Simon Gascoyne such that each of the characters have a motive to kill Simon ( Felicity: “I’ll kill you for this, Simon Gascoyne!”). For instance, Mrs Drudge answers the telephone and basically gives the setting and creates the element of suspense and mystery within the play:

Mrs Drudge: Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring….this is all very mysterious and I’m sure it’s leading up to something…

Major Magnus is the crippled half-brother of Lord Muldoon who appeared all of a sudden. Magnus turns out to be the Real Inspector Hound ( in the play’s play) and also Puckeridge (in Moon & Birdboot’s journalistic world) in addition to being Albert ( in the play’s play), Cynthia’s husband who was thought to be dead.

The dead body creates suspense from the very beginning. It was not a “character” initially, but towards the end when Birdboot discovers that the corpse is Higgs, it becomes a character, and reveals Puckeridge’s plot to kill the first and second stringer.



Bibliography

* Fleming, John. Stoppard’s Theatre: finding order amidst chaos. University of Texas Press, Austin, 2001.
* Martin, Richard and Rudiger Schreyer, Mirror Images (Klara Hurkova)
* Delaney, Paul, e. Tom Stoppard in Conversation, article: Stoppard Refutes Himself, Endlessly by Mel Gussow.
* Billington, Michael. Stoppard The Playwright. Methuen. London and New York. 1987.
* Gwee, Li Sui, lecture notes: Stoppard: The Text
* http://www.curtainup.com//stoppard.html
* http://www.stage-door.org/authors/stoppard.htm
* http://members.tripod.com/~warlight/aysegul2.html
* http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/001/712cycbw.asp

Done by: Lim Shu Fang (Sharon)

Birdboot and Moon

time and space in the real inspector hound...by kavitha

IN THEORY: TIME AND SPACE
IN STOPPARD’S ‘THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND’
The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard, directed by Charlie Todd. Dec. 1 - 5, 2000. Kenan Theatre. back to 2000 - 2001
BIRDBOOT AND MOON

A Critique says about the play:

"(H)is plays have a brilliant theatricality. He is, in fact, an exemplary autodidact, and a very quick study. In the plays, things are never quite what they seem to be. (...) Time plays tricks, as past and present coexist and sometimes brush against each other on the same stage. In many of his plays, there are echoes of his previous writings. The subject matter may shift from moral philosophy to quantum physics, but the voice is that of the author caught in the act of badinage, arguing himself in and out of a quandary." - Mel Gussow, American Theatre (December, 1995)
"...a comedy satire of high and delightfull quality, and great fun. Even though you may admire murder mysteries or, what is more unlikely, drama critics, you can appreciate its wisdom and revel in the hilarity with which Mr. Stoppard takes them apart. The action is fast, continuous, and extremely funny." Richard Watts, New York Post

"The dramatist of champagne ideas and intellectual curiosity can become dense and difficult in his joy of the mind. But the "Shakespeare Defense" will not do. It is said that we don’t always understand Shakespeare’s plays, either. But Shakespeare is a breeze compared to Mr. Stoppard. And Mr. Stoppard doesn’t borrow other dramatists’ plots. He has no need. He has no plots." - John Heilpern, The New York Observer (9/4/2001)



Cynthia and Simon

Moon’s famous words:
“I keep space warm for Higgs. My presence defines his absence, his absence confirms my presence, his presence precludes mine…When Higgs and I walk down this aisle together to claim our common seat, the oceans will fall into sky and the trees will hang with fishes ”

Use of the concept time and space in the play. It is clear to us the readers that the play is a manifestation of play within play. Where the plot remains together with the script, but only certain characters change each time, suggesting time within time. It is indeed an scandalous affair, that most prominently, we see that the male characters change and the female characters remain as who they are. It is an interesting use of the use of time and space. In fact one that swerves from the norm and present itself to us as a play that is different from the others. Artistic and brilliant.

Yet we only realize the twist in the play after the second half of the play, when the new characters take over, though in the beginning we do realize the character of Moon and Birdroot are two character totally detached from the play acted on the stage. Space within space. The characters are people part of the play outside the play with their own track. This suggests space within space.

Nevertheless, Stoppard seemed to have given us a clue right at the beginning of the play, when Moon says:

“MOON: I keep space warm for Higgs. My presence defines his absence, his absence confirms my presence, his presence precludes mine…When Higgs and I walk down this aisle together to claim our common seat, the oceans will fall into sky and the trees will hang with fishes.” (pg 10)

The connection is made between “presence” and “absence” , when one exists the other is not. Yet, it is hard not to notice that Moon and Higgs do exist at the same time, but in different place. Moon as the critique criticizing the play, drowned in self pity, and there lies Higgs on the stage, dead, as an un-living corpse. Two characters existing together, in a poor state, coincidently, one living the other dead.

Last night…Cynthia, Simon, Felicity and Magnus

What had Stoppard done? We do know that the play is labeled as a ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. The play itself is absurd as we see it. Outside the norm. it has no logic to it or any sort of comfortable reminders of the logical structure in the sense of time, space, or memory, which makes the play to have not any reliable meaning. The play eventually becomes featureless. Thus we could conclude that the Absurdist Theatre is one that the ineffectual tries to cope with the incomprehensible.
Eventually, we could study the concept of time and space in the play using the theory, ‘Formalism’. The play thoroughly uses the technique of defamiliarization and parallelism. These two techniques makes the play obscure.
Defamiliarization is a concept introduced by Viktor Shklovsky. According to Shklovsky, defamiliarization is,
“ And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The art of is to make the objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and the length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”
In short “ defamiliarization” could be rephrased as the “deviation of the norm”. As Shklovsky further argued, “that art needs to shock, to defamiliarize and subvert our sense of the normal…” ‘ The Real Inspector Hound’, is an attempt clearly deviating from the norm of sequenced narration of a play, in terms of time and space.
Deformalization in the play is combined with the concept of intertextuality to make the play more intricate. The play to a certain extend repeats itself, (play within play), where the second half of the play recurred itself in a modified form. For instance, Birdroot takes over the part of Simon Gascoyne, in the second half of the play, after the interval, and repeat the same dialogue as did the other artiste. It is somewhat a history repeating itself, revived by different characters, but the underlying plot is the same.
This further suggests the theory of Parallelism whish is connected to the use of time as an element to deformalize the play as a whole. Shklovsky states, “the perception of disharmony in a harmonious context is important in parallelism. The purpose of parallelism….is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of new perception” in his essay, “Art as Technique”. Parallelism in the play occurs when, another plot occurs along side plot as a play within a play. The parallel plots meet at a point, coincide and repeats itself again. The collision of parallel plays, in a way, “transfers” the “usual perception” and brought it to a new “sphere” of understanding. Thus Stoppard creates “ the vision which results from that deautomized perception” where the play is “perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to speak, in its continuity”(Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”).

Created by Kavitha Ke’ly S040006




Reference works
Roger Webster, Studying Literary Theory (London, 1996).
Julie Rifkin, Michel Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford, Blackwells Publishers Ltd.,1998).
Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound (London, Faber & Faber ).