Barnard Turner

Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982): New Frames and Old

Tom Stoppard has adapted the conventions of the play within the play frequently in his work, manipulating the relationships between ‘inner play’ and ‘outer play’ (and thus those between the audience and the performance) in ways which destabilise the former relationships while leaving intact those implicit in mainstream Western contemporary theatre-going practice. While there is great creativity in Stoppard’s staging and his correspondent adaptation of theatrical and literary conventions, tropes and gestures (ranging from a quasi-Brechtian episodicity to the classical contaminatio), the stage-audience dialectic itself is unshaken. Stoppard then offers only the illu- sion of flux or instability and, while this gesture increases the entertainment value, it lessens the provocation of the theatrical encounter. Considering two plays from different points in Stop- pard’s career – The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982) – this chapter argues that, while in their various ways they compound generic postmodernist ludic fragmen- tation, they remain traditional in their core theatrical value.

‘Commercial recordings of orchestral rehearsals are now available, presumably to allow audiences an intimate glimpse of the conductor at work. One wonders how these strips differ from the real thing.’ Erving Goffman1

Intertextuality as theme and structuring device informs Tom Stoppard’s plays, which often incorporate elements of other authors’ plays for purposes of parody or – more importantly here – of frame-shift. These inflexions produce role-reversals and misunderstandings, as in the mixture of sub-plot and vari- ous off-sides in Professional Foul; discordant time-frames, as in Arcadia or Travesties; the bric[k]olage of Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, and the more – at first glance – ‘traditional’ plays within plays that are The Real Ins- pector Hound2 and The Real Thing3 (the former one scene, the latter a se-

1 Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 126. 2 Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound, in Tom Stoppard: Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 1-44. Further references will be given in the text as RIH followed by page number. 3 Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing (New York: Faber and Faber, 1984). Further references will be given in the text as RT followed by page number. 114 Barnard Turner quence). Harold Bloom has described Stoppard’s trans-generic plays in terms of Senecan contaminatio, the ‘interlacing between an old play and a new one’,4 and such is in miniature the case with both the Real plays with which this chapter is principally concerned. Often, Stoppard rewrites existing or hypothetical but possible scenarios, or – in the Real plays – has characters do so, as, in Hound, critics Moon and Birdboot both comment on the play that they are watching and modify it by transgressing through what for them, if not for Stoppard’s audience, should be the ‘fourth wall’. In the second scene of The Real Thing, a professional writer (Henry) tries to imagine the conver- sation of a young soldier (Brodie) who has met an actress (Annie, later Henry’s wife) on a train (RT 32). While Henry is far from accurate in his suggestions for the dialogue, which is based on stale pick-up lines, Brodie’s own writing of this scene, in a play which Henry resists reworking, but which eventually is made for television, is in no way more accomplished or provoc- ative. If Brodie’s play is meant to ‘catch’ the national ‘conscience’, it is – like Hamlet’s interpolation into The Murder of Gonzago – an easy target, proving nothing and providing little which would encourage viewers to re- flect on its more general political claims, any more than might the allusions to Shakespeare’s Danish play that litter the surface of Stoppard’s play, such as ‘these few precepts’, ‘what’s a petard?’, or the attention to ‘words’, inno- cent or superfluous (RT 63, 75, 53). In many of these superimposed contexts, not entirely ironically perhaps, playwright Henry takes on the questionable status of critic and anxious father Polonius. All drama has always been in the detective mode: ‘[T]oute pièce est une enquête menée à bonne fin [Every play is an enquiry brought to a successful conclusion]’, says Choubert in Ionesco’s Victims of Duty (1953),5 a play which in some ways prefigures Hound in its playing with the detective genre (a detective calls here, too), in its staged monologue (more minor however than the interstitial play in Hound), and, of course, in its absurdist humour. In this game of detection, the contaminatio also extends to the assessment of motivation, and the audience must be nimble in assigning motive, role and guise. While the theoretical, but oxymoronic, task of seeing through the mask, the persona, is required in normal circumstances of, say, Faust, Othello and Volpone, this is particularly apparent in the play within the play. Actors play their titular characters; they represent themselves playing other characters; they take each other for real and take a tableau – fake to them – as a prick of the conscience. And, of course, the paradigm of this last is not Hamlet, but

4 Tom Stoppard, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 1. 5 Ionesco, Plays. Volume II, trans. by Donald Watson (London: John Calder, 1958), p. 269.