The World’s Funniest Whodunit: The Real Inspector Hound at the Cape Rep

It’s unclear whether playwright Tom Stoppard meant for this production to be a satirical send-up of theatre critics, country-house whodunits, or both—but it manages to do it all, and more.

The show opens with two theater critics, Birdboot (Jakov Schwartzeberg) and Moon (Ari Lew) who have, it would seem, seen it all and are jostling for position and recognition in their narrowly defined world. They’re reviewing a play (which for us then becomes a play-within-a-play), Murder at Muldoon Manor, that’s an over-the-top rendition of something akin to Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (which, interestingly, will be produced at the Harbor Stage Company later this summer) and will eventually break down a sort of secondary fourth wall and involve themselves in its conclusion. Their rapid-fire dialogue is satisfyingly cliché, including gems like, “Faced as we with such ubiquitous obliquity…” “hysteria is no substitute for éclat,” and “there are moments … when I think 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.”

They’re pre-writing their reviews and going on endlessly about individual pet peeves. Moon, we learn, is standing in for Higgs, a more well-established critic, and laments incessantly about his second-rank status. Birdboot is on the other hand a well-established critic who uses his power to improve young actresses’ careers as a way to seduce them while repeatedly and defensively denying infidelity to his wife Myrtle.

But then we come to the murder mystery itself, and it’s a tribute to the cast as an ensemble that Trish LaRose comes right to the edge of stealing the show as the manor’s “help,” Mrs. Drudge—who can clean a room without noticing the corpse under the sofa—and yet doesn’t. She’s brilliant, of course, but in this production so are the others: Emma Joanis as the ingenue Felicity, Erica Morris clearly having a blast as the over-the top Lady Felicity, Elijah Corbin (who remains as terrific as he was in 9-Ball) as the gymnastic Simon Gascoyne, Ian Ryan as the wheelchair-bound gruff Magnus, and finally Ian Hamilton as the possibly-real Inspector Hound.

Every performer fully embraces both Stoppard’s melodramatic take on the country-house-murder genre and the archetypes represented by their characters and, thanks to Holly Erin McCarthy’s deft directing, exhibit near-perfect comedic timing.

The Manor play opens with a view of a lonely moor at twilight, a hound baying dangerously and mist seeping into the building’s pores and a radio announcer warning of a killer at large, a satisfyingly Sherlockian place to start. And in solid Agatha Christie fashion, it soon becomes clear that every character could conceivably be said murderer.

As always, Ellen Rousseau’s scenic design is spot-on, capturing just the right ambiance, with secret passages and flickering lamps galore.

The audience had such fun with every turn of the whodunit’s histrionics and the critics’ bombast as the story’s two worlds collided into what can best be called an existential and very thick soup. Who killed whom? Who is whom? And who, after all, is the real Inspector Hound?

You’ll have to go and find out for yourself. Meantime, Cape Rep has pulled off a wonderful caper with superb acting that’s sure to please everyone. As both a theatre critic and a mystery writer myself, I have to say that laughing at my own two chosen genres was delightful and a good reminder that none of us should ever take ourselves too seriously.

review by Jeannette de Beauvoir

photos by Bob Tucker/Focalpoint Studio