THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND/BLACK COMEDY. To 7 September.
Perth
THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND
by Tom Stoppard and
BLACK COMEDY
by Peter Shaffer
Perth Theatre To 7 September 2002
Monm-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 45min One interval
TICKETS 01738 621031
Review Timothy Ramsden 29 August
Hits and misses in this now-popular pairing, with - as usual - the Shaffer coming out on top.
It was an inspired West End pairing a few years back that put these shortish 1960s comedies by heavyweights of the time together (it helps they have identical casting needs, a dead body in the Stoppard apart). The idea's caught on; during Perth's run another production's opening in Exeter. But the plays need more detailed comic style in the acting than's sometimes evident in this Scottish revival.
Stoppard's witty dialogue struggles to survive, victim of the disappearance of the partial hegemony once held by the old-style puzzle-thriller with its info-laden dialogue, unlikely coincidences and off-the-shelf characters the playwright was mocking. (King critic of 50s theatre Kenneth Tynan once remarked that to b e the kind of person represented on stage pre-1956 you either had to have the - then very large - income of £2,000 a year or be murdered in the house of someone who had.)
And, of course, within a few years of Hound first parodically sleuthing it on the London stage the other Shaffer - Anthony -had put the boot in to the genre with his Sleuth, the play which did for the crime play what Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had done for the domestic drama.
If anything what remains of Stoppard's spoof is the two critics, a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the front stalls, in a limbo, speaking different languages - the entertainment-seeking Birdboot and the intellectual Moon - and becoming ironically implicated in the action as did their Stoppard Shakespearean predecessors.
Shaffer too reworked an old idea, a Chinese piece about characters supposedly in pitch dark, though acted in blazing light. The original was an excuse for ingenious just-miss swordplay, for which Shaffer substituted furniture rmeoval (a neighbour's 'borrowed' furnishings have to be replaced when he arrives home unexpectedly, before the lights are restored and he discovers how his precious antiques have been misappropriated).
There's also satire on '60s artistic pretentiousness and a come-uppance for young artist Brindsley when his bohemian ex-girl turns up alongside the new Sloane fiancee and her disapproving military dad.
There are some laughs here, but they tend to come with momentary, one-off ideas - Alex Kerr's exaggerated pacing, trying to retrace his own steps in the dark. Somehow the pace and invention's not there to build the potential hilarity. And so the final, more verbal and philosophical section is too flat.
The acting varies. Iain Armstrong, a sudued Stoppard Inspector (it's not much of a part) comically captures the clipped military man, sure of himself yet in a world he can't bring ot his own terms. And Simon Holmes scores in his art-collector cameo rather than his wheelchair bound Stoppardian incarnation (another non-promising role). But Shonagh Price, who captures the rep ingenue with awful precision before the interval, doesn't seem able to make much of Shaffer's Carol.
Similarly Andrew Wincott's unfocused Moon gives way to a superbly camp Harold - it's more the production's responsibility than his that the fascination with Brindsley is not established soon enough, and that he's given nothing to do except pout during his character's absence from the dialogue.
Richard Addison is efficient both sides of the interval, and while Janet Michael's Mrs Drudge is fun enough you have to wait for her sublime performance in the Shaffer - a teetotaller weaned in the dark onto ever larger gins (she ends up sloshing the stuff from a vase) - with her quick bursts of semi-controlled trottings, to see the kind of detailed comic acting missing elsewhere.
Moon/Harold Gorringe: Andrew Wincott
Birdboot/Shuppanzigh: Richard Addison
Mrs Drudge/Miss Furnival: Janet Michael
Simon/Brindsley Miller: Alex Kerr
Felicity/Carol Melkett: Shonagh Price
Inspector Hound/Colonel Melkett: Iain Armstrong
Cynthia/Clea: Lisa Hayes
Magnus/Bamberger: Simon Holmes
Director: Michael Winter
Designer: Norman Coates
Lighting: Simon Sewell
Sound: Geoff Minto
Movement: Jack Murphy
2002-08-30 16:14:03