Director's Notes

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The brilliant Tom Stoppard is best known as a playwright and screen writer. His plays include Jumpers, Arcadia and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

 

As a script writer he co-wrote the Academy Award winning screenplay for the film Shakespeare in Love. 

 

Once he was also a theatre critic. 

 

In The Real Inspector Hound he affectionately sends up the classic 'whodunnit' and the theatre critics who inhabit their own world and loftily pronounce judgement on the work of others.

 

In the play's debut West End run in 1968 Ronnie Barker and Richard Briers took the parts of the two critics, Birdboot and Moon.

 

At the time, the producers of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap were upset because they felt that the plot twists in the play within a play were something of a spoiler for the twists in their own parlour mystery play (whatever they may be).

 

The play starts with the critics safely in their box, little knowing what will happen in the evening ahead…

 

Wyn Melville-Jones