 As another year starts for the Tower Theatre, I’m sure we are all wondering what the next twelve months will bring. Well, if the first production of the spring season is anything to go by, it’s going to be a great deal of fun with some cracking performances to boot. Kicking things off was Tom Stoppard’s early theatrical hit The Real Inspector Hound. This was, appropriately enough, directed by our new Board Chair, Rob Ellis leading from the front and reminding us all that what we do, we do for a sense of achievement, camaraderie and sheer enjoyment.
 Now, I’m a sucker for a bit of meta fiction and more specifically meta drama. One of the big West End hits of the moment is The Motive And The Cue which presents the audience with a forensic dissection of how a play is made through rehearsal, discussion, a modicum of disagreement and, ultimately, resolution. The play within a play which is under scrutiny in this is Shakespeare’s Hamlet and, of course, the Bard wasn’t averse to pulling the same trick by including in his structure a performance of a play called The Mousetrap. Which of course is where Agatha Christie found the title of her play which has now been running for over 70 years. This is, in turn, mercilessly parodied in Stoppard’s play. So that brings everything more or less full circle. To summarise: there I was, reviewing a play about two reviewers reviewing a play which, in both style and substance, is an obvious very heavy nod to Dame Agatha’s warhorse. This was more than meta drama – this was meta drama plus (supermeta?) and, so far as I was concerned anyway, sitting there with my trusty though metaphorical notebook and pen, almost immersive.
 The plot of the outer carapace of Stoppard’s always entertaining piece has the two reviewers, Moon and Birdboot, jostling for some sort of position and recognition within their narrow and closely guarded hierarchy. Often speaking in gloriously clichéd criticspeak, the pair invent ludicrously worded notices about what they are watching, though devoting an equal amount of attention to their own particular peccadilloes. Moon is obsessed with Higgs, the colleague for whom he is a substitute, and with Puckeridge, the colleague who may yet substitute for him. Meanwhile Birdboot is all too aware that he has had or would like to have liaisons with two of the cast members he is meant to be writing about. As matters progress the fourth wall breaks down and both men find themselves embroiled in events on stage as they trade places with the mysterious Simon and the even more mysterious, not to say eccentric, Inspector Hound – if that indeed is who he is. The critics become the actors and the actors become the critics. I’m not sure where that left the rest of us but the packed Saturday matinée audience had a great deal of fun working it all out.
 While Birdboot and Moon carped and criticised from the safety of their seats among the regular punters, something quite other was taking place in the centre of the stage. This was the play which the critics, if not the rest of us, had come to see and rejoicing in the flagrantly pungent title of Murder at Muldoon Manor. This was peopled by characters so omnipresent in the world of the country house whodunnit – the ingenue, the cad, the alluring widow, the woman who “does” – that it almost hurt. The characters were quaint yet more than faintly ridiculous, the actors playing them hammy in the extreme. Thankfully the actors playing the actors playing the characters (keep up at the back there!) did so with a great deal of skill and looked like they were having a great time, as I was assured afterwards that they were.
 Maeve Curry, excellent as melodramatic black widow Cynthia, came out with some totally unbelievable histrionics (which of course meant that they were actually totally believable) while Darren Chancey’s Inspector, conducting witness interviews in a bizarre get out which included a pair of brightly coloured carpet slippers, gave a mannered performance which was both in keeping yet somehow at odds with the general tone. A good idea to introduce this note of variation. Micky Gibbons and Emily Hassan played the juve leads with verve and precision, and the glint in the latter’s eye as she repeatedly threatend to kill the former suggested she just might be the culprit.
Daniel Watson had great fun charging around in a wheelchair as the somewhat demented Major Magnus. The chip on his shoulder was almost as large as the outrageously and necessarily fake hirsute growth on his top lip and it is possibly only this which prevented him from chewing up large chunks of the scenery. Giving the moustache a run for its money as the production’s star turn though was Sheila Burbidge as Mrs Drudge. She more or less stole the show with her tea trolley antics and habit of being in the wrong place at the right time (or possibly vice versa). It’s an absolute gift of a part and this interpretation was among the very best I’ve seen. Please Sheila, do a bit more acting in future!
 Meanwhile, back in the "real world", David Miller and Matthew Vickers made a fine double act of the pen pushing pundits. The former in particular sustained a wonderfully perpetually fatalistic hangdog air which suited the character so well as he worked through his ongoing existential crisis. Birdboot’s often casual approach to his chosen profession, his rampant libido and splenetic verbal defences of his own indiscretions were given ample rein by Vickers with an approach which paid homage to the part’s original creator, Ronnie Barker. Having played the part myself, I was several times tempted to join in but I resisted as that would have been taking the meta angle a tad too far.
 The play(s) were extremely well served by a first rate team of creatives. Max Maxwell created a suitably clichéd set complete with the ubiquitous French windows and vintage radio via which the dulcet tones of Colin Guthrie could be discerned. Lynda Twidale’s costumes, as they invariably are, were a delight while Stephen Ley and Stanley Piper’s skills with lighting and sound immediately ensured that the action was placed within a highly recognisable even if overworked genre. Rob Ellis’s very able direction, which included plenty of well pointed moments to keep several balls in the air and a number of plates spinning all at the same time, was full of telling detail which was a pleasure to encounter. This extended to the bogus programmes, posters and performer pictures lining the Tower stairwell which ensured the fun continued on the way into and out of the auditorium. It was nice to see this back in the “in the round” configuration. Actually quite hard to pull off this play with any other staging, even the fact that the audience could see each other added to the overall atmosphere.
Hound is the sort of piece where you just have to trust that the audience can keep up with the cross hatched story lines especially when the whole thing is thrown into reverse gear and events play out all over again albeit with a twist. If the pace flagged just a little in the second half that is probably no surprise but, to borrow a phrase from the eminent Mr Birdboot (though unlike him, I actually mean it) it was “a rattling good evening out. I was held!”
Photography by Jason Harris
|
