I am honestly not entirely sure what I thought of this?
(NB: I only read The Real Inspector Hound, not any of the other plays.)
On the one hand, it was a fun little one act play that took me around twenty minutes to read, and it made me laugh, and it made me go, what the hell? On the other hand, I’m 100% positive I missed things, and the cleverness of this play almost entirely went over my head.
All I could think of to say in our CBR book club discussion was a bunch of pretentious bullshit about the relationship between art and critics, which I then finished up with, “Or Stoppard could just be fucking with us.” (Spoiler: there’s a dead body on the stage the whole time which turns out to be a theater critic whose actual body (OR IS IT) is being used as a prop. This is SIGNIFICANT.)
The consensus seems to be that this play is both: Pretentious bullshit AND fucking with us.
I kinda dig it? I wish I could see it in person, though. Maybe I’ll track down that YouTube performance and see how it goes in its proper format . . .
