Theater review: Tom Stoppard’s ‘The Real Inspector Hound’ at MetroStage

Look at the bone-weary demeanor of the bow-tied scribbler Moon — slumped in a maroon chair, gripping a playbill, looking out with despairing resignation at a tidy drawing-room stage set. Surely no job on earth is as arduous, lonely and downright spiritually draining as that of theater critic.

Or so you might think, watching actor Ralph Cosham’s consummate portrait of Moon, a play-reviewer character in the enjoyable version of “The Real Inspector Hound” now at MetroStage. Director John Vreeke’s adroitly paced staging deftly brandishes the wit of this 1968 Tom Stoppard one-act, a brilliant parody of country-house detective stories and the conflict-fraught, egoism-inflating business of theater criticism. Vreeke’s production features a number of zesty performances, and most of the cast appears to be having a blast — but it’s Cosham’s brooding Moon who seems to live most fully in Stoppard’s delectably language-drunk, hall-of-mirrors world.

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A critic who’s more than a little obsessed with his own second-string status, Moon sits next to a fellow reviewer, the philandering Birdboot (Michael Tolaydo), at a whodunit that’s a schlocky knockoff of Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap.” After delivering some egregiously overinflated pronouncements on this piece of tripe (“I think we are entitled to ask — and here one is irresistibly reminded of Voltaire’s cry, ‘Voila’ — I think we are entitled to ask, Where is God?” Moon muses at one point), the critics find themselves tugged into the world of the fog-shrouded Muldoon Manor, where a madman is reportedly on the loose.

Looking aptly frumpy in a checked jacket, mismatched trousers and carnival-colored tie, Tolaydo’s Birdboot oozes smarmy self-importance, and he brings the right solipsistic, suspicious, competitive air to his conversations with Moon. In the play-within-the-play, Catherine Flye displays superb comic timing and a wicked command of baleful expressions as the saturnine Muldoon Manor housekeeper, Mrs. Drudge.

David Elias has a funny turn as Inspector Hound, clad, naturally enough, in Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker and Inverness cape (Ivania Stack designed the costumes), while Kimberly Gilbert and Emily Townley ham it up as Manor denizens Felicity Cunningham and Lady Cynthia Muldoon. Manically racing a wheelchair around designer Daniel Pinha’s succinct aristocratic-parlor set, a blanket-swaddled John Dow plays Major Magnus, who has turned up mysteriously at the Manor.

In a fun touch, whenever one of the characters utters one of the script’s periodic ultra-ominous remarks (e.g., “I think I’ll go and oil my gun”), lighting designer Brian S. Allard amps up a footlight or two, for a luridly melodramatic effect. Sound designer Steve Baena complements these moments with sinister cadences from screechy violins.

“The Real Inspector Hound” notably reunites director Vreeke with Cosham, Dow and Tolaydo, who appeared in Vreeke’s splendid MetroStage production of French playwright Gerald Sibleyras’ “Heroes” (translated and adapted by Stoppard) in 2009. Entertaining as it is, the current offering doesn’t have the buoyancy and brio of that earlier staging — you get the sense that Cosham and Tolaydo, at least, are less excited by this Stoppard staple than they were when tackling “Heroes,” a work that’s less well known in the Anglophone world.

Fortunately, there is such a thing as professionalism, a force that seems to have produced Cosham’s woebegone but dutiful Moon. When Sisyphus wearies of rolling his boulder up a Hadean hill, this Moon will sigh, uncap his pen and take notes on yet another play.

Wren is a freelance writer.

The Real Inspector Hound

by Tom Stoppard. Directed by John Vreeke. With Doug Krehbel, Bryant Centofanti, Jim Epstein, Larry Levinson, Devin Shadid. About 75 minutes. Through May 29 at MetroStage, 1201 N. Royal St., Alexandria. Call 800-494-8497 or visit www.metrostage.org.