Fridays, Saturdays 7.30pm/Sundays 2pm
Arrive half an hour before the show for drinks at Muldoon Manor. Formal 1950s style outfits are warmly encourgaged!
Castlemaine Theatre Company brings you a hilarious winter warmer, the classic one-act play ‘The Real Inspector Hound’ by Tom Stoppard, directed by Sam Archer. Written in the early 60s, it’s a playful spoof of the Murder Mystery genre, so popular in mid-century modern England. A ‘play within a play’ the audience is joined by two critics, a hack and a has-been, who mercilessly dissect the action, but all is not as it seems when the barriers between fact and fiction begin to blur!
Cast: Daniela Amaya Coria; Kevin Cook; Deirdre Gibb; Neetha Nambiar; Tim Ratcliffe; Emma Richardson; Iona Thomas Lawrence; and John Willis with Molly Snowball; Bonnie Swarris and Rob Tedge welcoming the audience to the Muldoon Manor.
Synopsis
Feuding theatre critics Moon and Birdboot are swept into the murder mystery play they are reviewing in London. The murder mystery, the play-within-a-play, is set at Muldoon Manor “an opulent home amid marshes and swamps near a cliff”. Nearby the Manor, a madman is on the loose.
With a storm on the horizon the police led by Inspector Hound cannot get to the Manor. As the
narratives of both plays continue, they intermingle with one another, including the actors between
plays, with both performances entwined by the end.
Director’s note
We are all addicted to storytelling, better yet if it comes with a witty plot, intrigue and exaggerated characters. Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound offers us numerous stories gleefully wrapped in a play within a play. It is a parody of Agatha Christie murder mysteries, an examination of the often eccentric and ridiculous nature of relationships, the pompous and esoteric language of theatre critics, and the absurdities of logic, language and culture. Life itself is overflowing with stories, theatrics and absurdities. And, like life, we can assume that Hound will have a beginning and certainly a middle. But we may well ask, and indeed ask we should, where and will this story end? Can you start with a pause? And who is The Real Inspector Hound?
Photography by Stephen Mitchell
