Combining Tom Stoppard’s one act farcical murder mystery ‘The Real Inspector Hound’ with his two shorter plays ‘Dogg’s Hamlet’ and ‘Cahoot’s Macbeth’, our company of players multi role across the three plays in order to present you with a spectacular evening of farce, intrigue and classic Shakespearean tragedy.

The Real Inspector Hound, by award-winning writer Tom Stoppard is a one-act farce lampooning everything Agatha Christie holds dear. Hound parodies the conventions of the clichéd drawing room murder mystery and the self-importance of egotistical theatre critics. At Muldoon Manor, the devastatingly attractive widow Lady Cynthia competes with the jealous Felicity for the affections of the charming yet suspicious Simon Gascoyne. A trigger-happy cripple called Magnus and the aptly named Mrs Drudge do their best to complicate matters. Enter bumbling Inspector Hound in search of a mysterious killer, and soon, red herrings, blue moons and pink faces abound. With nobody sure of who is whom, the plot collapses into hilarity and confusion. Hound brilliantly exploits theatrical forms, feeding off the conventions of theatre itself, as reality and illusion converge and collide.

Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth are two one-act plays by Tom Stoppard, which are often performed together as Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth. In "Dogg's Hamlet," a group of Dogg-speaking high school students set up for and perform a fifteen minute version of "Hamlet." Their process is dealt with by an unsuspecting deliveryman who finds he can't understand a word they're saying. This inconsistency leads to confusion on the part of the play’s characters, who try to communicate in their respective languages, English and Dogg. By the end of this first play, the English speaking character, Easy, is speaking Dogg.

Cahoot’s Macbeth, which is more political in nature, was dedicated to a Czechoslovakian playwright, Pavel Kohout. Because censorship in his country prevented public theatrical productions, Kohout wrote an abbreviated version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which he performed in people’s living rooms. Stoppard’s play features a similar living-room theatre production of Macbeth, which gets broken up by an inspector, who threatens to arrest the actors and audience members for breaking the censorship rules. However, Easy, the English-speaking character from the first play, arrives and the actors catch the language of Dogg. When the inspector comes back a second time and catches them speaking entirely in Dogg, he cannot arrest them because he does not understand what they are saying.

 

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