Essay On Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound

Contemporary English playwright Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) is not only a worthy successor to 18th-century playwright Richard Sheridan’s The Critic (1781) but succeeds in this capacity without appearing to be a mere doppelgänger and, instead, adds a new sense of depth with a critique of critics brought about by madness and facing one’s identity. The parallels drawn between the two plays do not mimic one another so much as present a multitude of related ideas in a similar fashion. One of the major similarities between the two is that of the “hall of mirrors” effect. Within both plays, the frame play includes an interior play, typically with actions and characters separate from the frame play: the traditional “play-within-a-play”

As a result, she begins to address him as such, outright calling him Simon Gascoyne. While this is a humorous moment, this event draws back to the idea of the “hall of mirrors” effect. The frame play, which involves Moon and Birdboot, begins to merge with the interior play to the point of Birdboot losing his identity of Birdboot and quite literally taking on the role of Simon—from his opening lines to his death. Moon later suffers the same fate, taking on the role of Inspector Hound. At the end of the play, the “hall of mirrors” effect comes forward again. As mentioned, Moon wonders whether Puckeridge dreams of killing him as he himself dreams of killing Higgs. Prior to Birdboot’s demise, he discovers that the hidden body is none other than Higgs’s:

Moon’s dialogue raises the question of whether he possibly killed Higgs, alluding to the idea presented before of whether the play writes the authors. Other characters’ dialogue also hints towards Moon’s character, Hound, being a madman who killed Higgs. Furthermore, due to the blurred lines between character and true identity, not to mention Moon’s previous statement of his desire to kill Higgs, it seems completely

After Birdboot’s death, Moon breaks his character for a moment and attempts to return to his seat, only to discover the real Simon and Inspector Hound have taken his place and are now portraying the role of critics Birdboot and Moon respectively:

This follows the idea of The Real Inspector Hound being a successor—and a successful one at that—to The Critic as opposed to a copy. One can argue that Moon’s madness appeared the moment he took upon the role of Inspector Hound, but his actions start to truly resemble madness in this instant. After discovering Hound has filled his “role”, rather than running off the stage or attempting to leave the theatre, Moon continues to act like a character in the play, though with a bit of realism clinging to his mind as he struggles with the idea that Birdboot is truly dead and that the fellow critic Higgs is also