The BC Q&A: Inspector Hound director Diego Arciniegas

Hound director Diego Arciniegas

If you haven’t already seen the Publick Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, this week is your last chance. The play is at the BCA through September 25. I caught it in previews, and can say that fans of this site who enjoy English comedy – Monty Python, Eddie Izzard, Beyond the Fringe – will enjoy Stoppard and this play. You can see my review here.

If you want to interact with the characters beforehand, you can become Facebook friends or fans (find the links on PublickTheatre.com). Director Diego Arciniegas and his cast also have a few surprises even for those familiar with the play. Traditionally a one-act paired with Stoppard's After Magritte, the Publick production stands alone, with a few ingenius additions to make it a 90-minute play.

I spoke with Arciniegas via e-mail this weekend.

When did you first encounter The Real Inspector Hound?

My first exposure to the play was when I was a freshman in high school. Our Theatre Department took it to the Massachusetts High School Drama Festival.

Have you directed it before?

Yes, once, when I was teaching at a boarding school in England. It was a very different production (I still have pictures). Felicity had a can of Sprite in her hand during her scene with Simon - I don't know why now.

What made you decide to do it this time?

I wanted to do something funny, smart and full of wordplay. I think comedy is a better idea-delivery-system than drama these days. I knew there was a bigger, edgier play lurking within this play and was interested in exploring that.

Did you consider doing it in its original one-act form with After Magritte?

Actually no. I noticed that within the play there are supposed to be two intermissions (three act plays were quite the thing in murder mysteries). I actually considered having two intermissions, but then realized that as the play spirals out of control, I wanted the intermissions to get faster and faster like in a fun house.

The tea scene is the obvious beneficiary of giving the play more time – where else did you target to add some space?

The beginning of the play, the false starts. Stoppard's stage directions have Moon already in the audience and detail how he turns the pages one after another. I found that a little undramatic, so I substituted the repeated false starts. That put some time on the production. Also having Mrs. Drudge vacuuming for a good 20 seconds as the start of the play added some time.

I noticed that Stoppard, through the character of Birdboot, sets down some pretty rigid rules of theatre, and then the playwright smashes those rules. "You can't start with a pause" (the vacuuming), and yet the play starts with a pause. I detected a young playwright rebelling against the conventions of theatre and brilliantly making them work. But actually the running time of this play is normally about 50 - 60 minutes. So we only really put about fifteen more minutes on the play. It is the inclusion of an fifteen minute intermission that brings us to 90 minutes.

The Real Inspector Hound at the BCA

How did the Facebook idea come about?

It seemed the logical extension of the metatheatrical nature of the play. If we supposed that this was really happening, and that these were real people committing the perfect murder and burying it in plain sight. And if it was true that these theatre critics get caught up in the world of the play, than it only made sense that they should have a life outside the theatre as well. I also roped the House Manager and the Stage Manager into doing performative things as well. So I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying that it was part of the attempt to blurr the boundaries of what was real and what wasn't.

I don’t want to give away the surprise for the intermission, but whose idea was that?

It was the audience's idea really. I think we had confused them so profoundly that they needed to know it was safe and okay to get up out of their seats. In previews they weren't getting up because they didn't want to miss anything, and I felt it was cruel to mess with their minds too much.

Stoppard has called Hound a kind of mechanical wind-up toy, that it has lasted somehow with very little change. Are you familiar with that description? Do you agree with it?

Basically I do, but I think he gives himself less credit than he deserves. If it is a wind up toy, it is closer to the out-of-control robots might see in Terminator or some movie like that. There's a danger and a darkness lurking in the play that the term "mechanical wind-up toy" doesn't do justice to. But I agree about the mechanistic nature of the play.

Did you discuss anything else to break the fourth wall that you decided against?

Some of my actors who were dead at the end of the play did not want to get up for the curtain call. I thought that would be pompous and pretentious. The evening’s entertainment had to end after all. So the resulting compromise was the curtain call as you see it now.

Moon to Moon: The Real Inspector Hound

The Publick Theatre's The Real Inspector Hound 

About 16 years ago, I was in a college production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. I was a big fan of Stoppard’s, having found him through his film adaptation of his most well-known play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I was a huge high school Monty Python nerd (I was told by my high school guidance counselor that my “Monty Pythonish sense of humor” was a distraction to my schoolmates and thus, no National Honors Society for me).

It was an easy transition from Python to Stoppard. And I had spent enough time parroting Python sketches that I had a pretty good English accent. At least for a kid from tractor country. So I was excited to audition and show off my abilities. Alas, we did the show without accents.

I played Moon, a second-string theatre critic watching a second-rate murder mystery with a fellow critic. Hard to say much more without giving it away, but I got to literally jump off of the stage at the audience in the end, breaking that fourth wall in an utterly ridiculous way. It was as much fun as I’ve ever had onstage.

Back to the present. I noticed a couple of days ago that the Publick Theatre in Boston was mounting Hound at the BCA. I felt a wave of goodwill, and made arrangements to see it Friday night, the second night of previews.

I was admittedly excited to see the play. I realized when I got there, and started looking around the set, that I had never actually seen the play, just been in it and read it. Despite a thick fog surrounding Boston and promises over the past 36 hours of a plague of frogs, the theater was mostly full. I sometimes wonder what kind of demographic enjoys Stoppard, and it seemed like a fairly diverse crowd in terms of age and relative hipness.

The college production I participated in (I am hesitant to say it rose to the level of “acting”) was a one-act play. Director Diego Arciniegas’s program notes mention that Hound is often on the bill with other one acts. But Arciniegas has always thought the play needed more room to breathe, and this production gives it that room, as a stand-alone 90-minute play.

“Taking our cue from the playwright,” he writes, “we set about to give the play the time it deserves, placing an intermission where Stoppard suggests there might be one, and suggesting another at an appropriate place.”

One of the themes of the play is breaking the fourth wall, as the critics and the cast of the play they are watching become inextricably intertwined. Arciniegas and his cast take that one step further – the characters Felicity Cunningham, Inspector Hound, and Simon Gascoyne all have Facebook pages which, in his introduction, the director encourages the audience to join. It’s a brilliant and fun device, keeping the audience involved even after they’ve left the theater.

The show’s pacing is perfect. The breathing room is obvious, especially directly after the intermission, when we rejoin the story at tea time. Arciniegas also takes the intermission as an opportunity for a well-placed gag, not that the show lacks laughs anywhere along the line.

The cast is first-rate, especially Gabriel Kuttner as Magnus in his wandering electric wheelchair and Sheridan Thomas, who plays Mrs. Drudge with a cockney deadpan reminiscent of Peter Cook. And they do some of their best work at final bows.

Yes, there is a meta aspect to this – more than 16 years after playing theatre critic Moon, I am an arts and entertainment writer, and to top it off, I’m reviewing the play I was in. For this particular play, nothing could be more appropriate.