T H E A T R E R E S O U R C E G U I D E

Jaclyn Johnson & Seth Kaltwasser, Co-Artistic Director

Jennifer Seeley, Finance Director

Peter Weber, Technical Director & Facilities Manager

Rachel Kuhnle, Arts Education Director, Artistic Associate

Josiah Laubenstein, Marketing Manager, Artistic Associate

DeeAnne Naegelen, Box Office

Jenell Johnson, Box Office/Event Coordinator

Table of Contents

2 For Teachers

3 About the Playwright

4 Context & Character List

5 In Their Own Words: The Playwright on Writing

6 The Play’s Perspective

7 A Comedy On All Sides: Our Unique Staging

8 In Class Activity

9 The Part YOU Play

by Tom StoppardDirected by Rachel Kuhnle

St. Croix Festival Theatre, Franklin Square Black Box, 125 N. Washington Street, St. Croix Falls, WI

The Real Inspector Hound

For Teachers

Using this theatre resource guide

This theatre resource guide for The Real Inspector Hound is designed to be used with students before and after attending the Festival Theatre production. The guide includes information and activities that will increase student understanding of this and other theatrical performances. You may reproduce any and all of the following pages to distribute to students or parents.

About the Playwright Page 3A brief biography for playwright Tom Stoppard.

Context and Character List Page 4A little background information on The Real Inspector Hound and a Who’s Who of characters.

In Their Own Words: The Playwright on Writing Page 5A few quotes from Tom Stoppard.

The Play’s Perspective Page 6How do we talk about this play? Here are some helpful terms defined.

A Comedy On All Sides: Our Unique Staging Page 7Our staging of The Real Inspector Hound is unlike anything you’ll see again!

In Class Activity: Thinking Critically Page 8Take a tip from Birdboot and Moon and write your own theatre review of The Real Inspector Hound.

The Part YOU Play Page 9This page reminds students of their role as audience members, stressing the importance of listening carefully and responding appropriately. Post-performance discussion questions are also included.

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About the Playwright

Tom Stoppard was born on July 3, 1937 in Czechoslovakia. As a child, he lived for a while in Singapore and India before moving to England with his mother and stepfather in 1946.

His writing career started when he became a journalist working for publications like Western Daily Press, Bristol Evening World, and London’s Scene magazine in the early 1960’s.

During this time, Stoppard had some work as a theatre critic —just like the characters in The Real Inspector Hound. In the mid-1960’s, he began writing plays for radio and television and had his big break in 1966 after his stage play

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival—a famous open access performing arts festivals that continues to this day.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of the two minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern--friends and classmates of Hamlet’s who betray him and unceremoniously die offstage. The play was such a success, it went all the way to Broadway and won a Tony Award for Best Play in 1968.

That same year, Stoppard premiered The Real Inspector Hound at the Criterion Theatre in London.

Tom Stoppard is known for his intellectual plays which frequently take complicated philosophical debates (questions about order vs. chaos, determinism vs. free will) and animate these questions on stage in the lives of his characters. But that doesn’t mean his plays are stiff and serious; Stoppard is also known for his comedy—all of his work exhibits a hilarious wit and wordplay.

Stoppard’s work includes the plays The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), and the screenplay for The Bourne Ultimatum and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. He was knighted in 1998. He is 79 years old.

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The Playwright: Tom Stoppard

Context & Character List

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The Real Inspector Hound was written between 1961 and 1962 and premiered at the Criterion Theatre in London on June 17, 1968.

The play centers on a pair of theatre critics, Birdboot and Moon, who are watching a performance of a play. While Moon grumbles about being the second-string theatre critic, and Birdboot swoons over the leading actresses, the play they watch tells the story of the secluded Muldoon Manor and the dangerous madman lurking outside.

Character List

TheaTre CriTiCs:Birdboot — a popular first-string theatre critic with a reputation of wooing stage actressesMoon — a second-string theatre critic replacing first-string critic Higgs

The “Play Within the Play” CharaCTers: Mrs. Drudge — A maid at Muldoon Manor Simon Gascoyne — A visitor to Muldoon Manor, who is in love with CynthiaFelicity Cunningham — Cynthia’s young friendCynthia Muldoon — The widow of Lord Albert Muldoon, who mysteriously disappeared ten years agoMajor Magnus Muldoon — the half-brother of Lord Albert, who is visiting from CanadaInspector Hound — an officer searching for an escaped madman

CharaCTers Named BuT uNseeN (Mostly):Higgs — an absent first-string theatre critic for whom

Moon substitutesMyrtle — Birdboot’s wife, who, according to Birdboot,

stayed home because the play was too much of a thriller

Puckridge — a third-string theatre critic whom Moon often mocks

On the role of the dramatist...“I don’t trust writers who wax confidently about what they do and why they do it. … In writing plays, I find that the problems — if that’s what they are — are very mundane, and in a way surface. The wellspring of a play is often curiously uninteresting — it all derives from insubstantial stray images and ideas. What it doesn’t arise from at all, I don’t think, is anything like a complete sense of the whole. You know, What am I going to try to achieve here? What is it going to be about underneath? … I seldom worry about underneath. Even when I’m aware that there is an underneath. I tend to try and suppress it further under, because theater is a wonderfully, refreshingly simple event. It’s a storytelling event. The story holds or it doesn’t. You don’t get the point or its significance if it doesn’t hold. The same would be true of a short story or a novel.”

Tom Stoppard, as quoted by Angeline Goreau, “Is The Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?” The New York Times, August, 1992

On the process of writing Hound...(Spoiler Alert)“The one thing that The Real Inspector Hound isn’t about, as far as I’m concerned, is theatre critics. I originally conceived a play, exactly the same play, with simply two members of an audience getting involved in the play-within-the-play. But when it comes actually to writing something down which has integral entertainment value, if you like, it very quickly occurred to me that it would be a lot easier to do it with critics, because you’ve got something known and defined to parody. So it was never a play about drama critics. If one wishes to say that it is a play about something more than that, then it’s about the dangers of wish fulfilment. But as soon as the word’s out of my mouth I think, shoot, it’s a play about these two guys, and they’re going along to this play, and the whole thing is tragic and hilarious and very, very carefully constructed. I’m very fond of the play because I didn’t know how to do it. I just got into it, and I knew that I wanted it somehow to resolve itself in a breathtakingly neat, complex but utterly comprehensible way… I didn’t know that the body was Higgs, and I didn’t know that Magnus was going to be Puckeridge, I mean, as soon as I realized the body had to be Higgs and, later, Magnus had to be Puckeridge, as solutions to the problems in writing that play, it made sense of all the things I’d been trying to keep going.”

Tom Stoppard, “Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas” Theatre Quarterly, 4 (May-July 1974).

In their Own Words: The Playwright on Writing

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The Play’s Perspective

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The Real Inspector Hound is a Satirical Farce featuring a Play Within A Play which Parodies the Cliches of Agatha Christie’s Closed Circle & Country-House Mysteries. It is often considered an Absurdist piece of theatre and explores themes of Existentialism.

...What does this mean?

Here’s some help from Miriam-Webster:

SATIRICAL: using humor to show that someone or something is foolish

FARCE: a funny play or movie about ridiculous situations and events

“PLAY WITHIN A PLAY”: a device where the real audience is watching a play that involves other characters watching or putting on another play

PARODIES: a piece of art that imitates the style of someone or something else in an amusing way

CLICHES: a phrase or expression that has been used so often in stories that it is no longer original or interesting

AGATHA CHRISTIE: Agatha Christie was a popular English writer, whose creative twists on whodunit-style mystery thrillers made her one of the world’s most read novelists

CLOSED-CIRCLE & COUNTRY-HOUSE MYSTERIES are a popular style of murder mystery made famous by Agatha Christie. In these stories, outside circumstances prevent the characters from leaving the scene of a crime

THEATRE OF THE ABSURD is drama using the abandonment of conventional dramatic form to portray the futility of human struggle in a senseless world. Major exponents include Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Harold Pinter.

EXISTENTIALISM is a chiefly 20th century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong, good or bad.

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The Real Inspector Hound is very much written to be done with a proscenium stage. The proscenium stage supports comedy well in that everyone in the audience more or less sees the exact same show. Jokes and sight gags are consistent and sightlines, or the line-of-sight from the audience to the actors, are completely unobstructed. However, a con of prosceniums is that the audience is very removed from the action on stage.

For this particular play, our proscenium in the Franklin Square Black Box had itself some major sightline problems. For The Real Inspector Hound, there is a real need for the audience to be able to see the floor of the stage and the critics, Birdboot and Moon, as they are seated in their seats. Because of these needs, we decided to stage the show with an arena stage.

By staging Hound in the arena, the audience is right in the action. Arena staging works great in small, intimate theatre spaces like the Franklin Square Black Box. Certain visual gags required by the script work better because the audience is able to easily see the stage floor and the seated Birdboot and Moon. However, the major difference by staging The Real Inspector Hound in the arena is that every seat in the theatre experiences in many ways a very different show. And because the audience is smack dab in the middle of the action, our actors are more vulnerable and exposed.

A Comedy On All Sides: Our Unique Staging

In Class Activity

What is this production trying to say, or, what is the theme or main idea?

Birdboot and Moon are theatre critics and we hear snippets of their forthcoming reviews throughout the play. We invite you to write your own review of Festival Theatre’s production of The Real Inspector Hound.

After viewing the performance, write a brief synopsis of the action of the play. Then, ask yourself:

Thinking Critically

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What effect does this play have on you? (This can be either positive, negative, indifferent or some combination.)

What was the most memorable part of the production?

How did the rest of the audience seem to respond to the play?

How do the design elements (light, sound, costume, set design) all work together to help tell the story?

Did the unique staging of The Real Inspector Hound with an arena stage support or hinder the storytelling?

Did the final moment of the play support the central theme?

Reacting to the Performance

After the performance, share your experience of The Real Inspector Hound with your class, family and friends:

• Who was the most memorable character and why?

• What was your favorite part of the play and why?

• What were the lessons and themes of the play?

• This is a whodunit, so...who did it?

Get InvolvedFor information about Arts Education opportunities

at Festival Theatre, visit www.festivaltheatre.org or call 715.483.3387.

Theatre EtiquetteTo prepare for presenting The Real Inspector Hound, actors memorized their lines and practiced their movements. They worked with directors. The costume and set were also planned. The stage manager is ready to make sure everyone on stage and backstage is safe and does the right things at the right time. All Festival Theatre needs now is YOU!

YOU have a part to play in The Real Inspector Hound. You are the audience. Your part requires you to listen carefully and watch closely.

It’s okay to laugh or applaud if you enjoy a play, but remember that you and the actorsare in the same room. Talking or whispering to friends during the performance will distract actors. Help them play their parts well by playing YOUR part well.

THe Part You Play 9