Review: THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND, Lockdown Theatre on Zoom

Sunday evening saw a very different kind of Zoom call. In aid of The Royal Theatrical Fund, Lockdown Theatre presented another excellent performance; Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound, featuring an absolutely stellar cast who performed the play as a live table read over Zoom.

Directed by Jonathan Church, who also directed the play in Chichester in 2010, Stoppard's play-within-a-play is a clever and rather absurdist parody of both country house murder mysteries and the egotism of theatre criticism.

Through the creation of caricatures, with cliched and overblown vocabulary and mannerisms, Stoppard highlights the stereotypes of the genre. He also completely sidesteps the convention of justice prevailing in the end, with a myriad of loose ends left flapping. As all the characters, with the exception of one, give death threats to the eventual victim, the tension is both built and mocked.

Theatre critics Moon and Birdboot are attending a play where an escaped madman is on the loose and Inspector Hound is leading the search. A dead body, secret love affairs, tested loyalties and death threats play out. As the action goes on in front of them, the critics continue their own conversations about hierarchy in their jobs, Birdboot's alleged penchant for female actors and how murdering other rival critics might elevate their positions. As the play progresses, the critics become directly involved with the action on stage to a wildly chaotic and very funny conclusion.

Simon Callow reads the critic Moon. He is excellent at expressing the repression and weariness at what he sees as his arduous job, frustrated at his status as 'second-string' critic and driven to write increasingly pretentious copy. Callow has a great rapport with Derek Jacobi, who reads the philandering Birdboot, oozing with self-importance and suspicion in his fellow critic.

Jennifer Saunders' expertise in deadpan comic timing is very much in evidence as the slightly daft Mrs Drudge. Freddie Fox reads Simon Gascoyne with rakish charm and often cannot help smiling at the script as it is read out by the other actors. Emilia Clarke has great fun hamming it up as a pouty Felicity Cunningham and Samantha Bond is nicely uptight as Lady Cynthia Muldoon.

Sanjeev Bhaskar is brilliantly over-the-top as Magnus, half-brother of Cynthia's late husband. His left eyebrow surely deserves an acting credit of its own. Gary Wilmot is suitably absurd as the dense Inspector Hound. Notably one of the play's smallest roles, this is another neat inversion of a character that traditionally would be the biggest part.

As this is a table read, it is inevitable that integral physical parts of the play are missing; the dead body, the visual comedy and the way that the critics move from their seats to step onto the stage and into the action. However, the excellent Robert Lindsay's role as narrator means stage directions were read out, the story was easy to follow and no detail was missing. There was also the very amusing use of a banana by several characters as a substitute for a phone.

Despite a few of the usual audio and visual glitches we have all come to expect from Zoom calls in the last few months, the production went remarkably smoothly from a technical perspective. There is great simplicity in this way of experiencing a play, as there is little to concentrate on except the words. It is not trying to be a substitute for live theatre, but it is an innovative and very enjoyable piece of entertainment.

It is a real pleasure, and also slightly strange, to watch such acting talent at work live on a computer screen. This was certainly a Zoom call like no other.

More information on The Royal Theatrical Fund can be found here

Photo Credit: Lockdown Theatre

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