I am Inspector Tiger...

One of my favourite playwrights is Tom Stoppard, a veritable theatrical genius. His play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of my favourites; it’s an intellectual tennis match with the audience, as Stoppard retells the story of Hamlet from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s two school friends. Throughout the play, the characters ponder on their purpose, the meaning of life, and the role of the theatre in life (although, of course, just about nobody debates that last point out loud).

Some of these elements are transferred into The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard’s first play and a lively parody of the country-house whodunit, particularly Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Our two main characters are Birdboot and Moon, theatre critics. Birdboot is a fickle critic who is willing to give actresses positive reviews in exchange for certain favours. Moon is a second-string critic, substituting for Higgs, the first-stringer, who has failed to show up.

They do but jest...

Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has attained a level of fame by setting a record as the longest-running play in theatre history. The story is a fairly routine one, with an isolated circle of suspects and murder (of course). It’s an expansion of the 1948 short story Three Blind Mice and premiered in 1952, and it hasn’t run out of steam since.

But in Scott K. Ratner’s play Kill a Better Mousetrap, Miles Edward Merbinau argues that it’s one of Christie’s worst efforts—“all the superficial trappings of a great Christie work, with none of the ingenuity,” he says. Personally, I’ve never seen a production of The Mousetrap, but my impression from reading the script was that it was an agreeably silly little play with a few nice touches of ingenuity.