To review ‘The Real Inspector Hound’ just after watching it is not easy as the play does not readily invite criticism. In fact, it mocks it.

Once the curtain’s raised the audience are presented with the quintessential country-house drawing-room and, just beyond, a row of auditorium chairs uncannily similar to those you’re ensconced in. Within these sit two ‘critics’, Moon (Oliver Marsh) and Birdboot (Kit Hildyard), who proceed to offer hackneyed reflections on the action of the play from the other side of the large mirror that seems to have been wedged through the middle of the stage, simultaneously exposing the messy details of their own messy lives (Birdboot appears to have indulged in an extra-marital affair with an actress in the ‘play’, whilst Moon is enveloped in existential anguish over his own Borgesian doppelganger, Higgs.) The play in hand is a clichéd ‘whodunit’ in the style of Agatha Christie and, as it develops, audience members turn into cast and vice versa; the lines between art and reality become blurred (these critical platitudes are difficult to avoid.)

One might assume that meta-theatre of this kind is tricky to perform, but what this production proved is that a play of such intellectual calibre largely sustains itself. The wit and wordplay are so self-consciously fledged and flown that one wonders whether poor delivery can bring them down (in fact the burden of effective execution was something that the actors seemed aware of, forcing occasional errors from the sheer weight of the linguistic material.)

Not that the performances were bad at all: Marsh and Hildyard played Moon and Birdboot confidently, the former with a lethargic energy that leaked and lapsed accordingly and the latter with a wonderfully distorted sense of sanctimony. Pete Skidmore’s Inspector Hound was suitably droll and shifty, while the other murder-mystery archetypes being satirised (Felicity the provincial beauty, Magnus the crippled half-brother) carried their singular dimensions with obvious gusto. The show was stolen however by Oliver Marsh whose concentration never wavered; there was a continuity of action and voice that shaped his Moon smoother than Hildyard’s Birdboot and rendered his performance quite engaging. At the point when Moon and Birdboot become involved in the action of the murder-mystery and two of the players take on the role of critics, Marsh managed to establish a dramatic connection between his murky roles where his companion didn’t. Technically the performance benefited from the dramatic possibilities offered by the Queens College Fitzpatrick Theatre. A booming PA facilitated the various auditory props (samples that included ringing parlour telephones and suspicious police newscasts) and the cues were perfectly on time.   

What this performance didn’t lack was laughter and for wit, puns and comic absurdity it certainly delivered. Whether we should attribute this to the play or the performance is unclear, however it is clear that the production was overall a success.