The Inspector After Magritte

Introduction

Directing Projects

Song of Blood

The Dybbuk

The Bacchae

The Inspector

After Magritte

The Inspector After Magritte

After Magritte & The Real Inspector Hound
by Tom Stoppard

Opened at the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj on October 3rd, 2003


After Magritte		The Real Inspector Hound

The two one-act plays that followed Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead were both, in concept if not in length, no less brilliant than his earlier masterpiece. The first of these, The Real Inspector Hound, is one of his most famous plays, and it has been traditionally been performed as a double-bill with After Magritte.

Both of these plays appeared for the first time in a Hungarian translation in 2003, and in a radical change of pace after the complex and mysterious White Fire/Black Fire (Dybbuk), these two plays were Davids second production at the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj. Both of them deal with one of Stoppard's favorite subjects: the elusiveness of reality.


After Magritte		The Real Inspector Hound

After Magritte is a hilarious farce in which different versions of the same, extremely simple story are superimposed one upon the other creating a dizzying confusion surrounding a supposed crime, that the enterprising Inspector Foot of the Yard and the plodding Constable Holmes simply cannot unravel. The end of the play is a totally surreal and totally logical tableau, entirely worthy of the painter who inspired it all – Rene Magritte.

Described by one critic as "an object of pure virtuoso craft and display…as nearly perfect as a P.G.Wodehouse plot: tiny, ludicrous and beautiful as an ivory Mickey Mouse," in The Real Inspector Hound Stoppard takes his fascination with the mixture of theatre and reality a step further, creating a disturbing mélange of the real and the fantastic in a truly bizarre send-up of an old-fashioned Country House Murder Mystery. Two critics who have come to review a play cross over the

boundary supposedly separating the "safe" reality of their numbered seats, from the "dangerous" fantasy of the play, and get involved, fatally as it turns out, in the lives and events of the characters in the play.

The style of these plays and their comic genre do not lend themselves to adaptations such as the one David created in White Fire/Black Fire or later in The Bacchae, therefore, with the help of the brilliant comic talents of the actors of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, the production simply allowed the brilliance of the playwright's work to speak for itself.

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