Seeing-eye Tortoise

THE CRITIC has to be a bit wary of these Tom Stoppard plays, since one of them puts a couple of critics right on stage and then draws them into the play. After that, some bad things--whose closer description might spoil Stoppard's beautifully elaborate plot--happen to them, so this critic at least is keeping one eye over his shoulder as he writes. I certainly have nothing against Tom Stoppards, who is the most original, witty and maybe even profound playwright to emerge in English for a decade. But I think he may have something against critics in general, having once been one himself, before his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern broke on the London theater scene. Perhaps he shares reviewer-character Moon's jealousy of the first stringer who overshadows him, or reviewer-character Birdboot's moral outrage at other critic's criticism of his rather intense interest in a new actress each opening night. All I know is that one feels it wise to be on one's best critical behavior, for safety's sake, in inspecting a play like The Real Inspector Hound.

Hound has its critics watching a whodunit parodied from Agatha Christie's long-running The Mousetrap. They ramble on to themselves between acts, testing net phrases for their reviews. They speed-reed their programs and eat chocolates. They compare quotations: Birdfoot's review that was completely reproduced in neon, for instance. "Oh that thing, yes, I just happen to have a couple of color transparencies of it here in my pocket." Robert Vaughn, in little soloquies complete with Shakespearean intonation, worries about his rivals Higgs (first string) and Puckeridge (third string). Michael Egan, tremendous and goateed, is perfect for the lecherous Birdfoot.

On stage, the maid Mrs. Drudge answers the phone with "Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring." The stock characters dash to and fro, pausing in place long enough to let the critics' discussion go on without competition. --Until the phone rings again on a deserted stage and Birdfoot leaves his seat to answer it; it's his jealous wife. And before Birdfoot can get back to his seat...

Mary Ed Porter (as a stand-in for Connie For-slund) stood out as the simpering, wispy daughter Felicity.

AFTER MAGRITTE, the short play which comes first, has the philosophical-absurd precision of Stoppard's latest work Jumpers. Jumpers is now being produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where the current Boston production also originated. There is a question of what was observed by several individuals at the scene of a crime, and the discussion of whether it was, say, a black minstrel with one leg or a white-bearded old man with a "seeing-eye tortoise" is pursued in tightly logical but ridiculous dialogue at which Robert Vaughn and Katherine McGrath, as a pair of entertainers just back from an exhibit of Magritte paintings, excel. It is, of course, a theatrical equivalent of Magritte's surrealism, a kind of trompe l'oe il of the stage, where the characters quibble with intense specificity about their own conflicting illusions.

And in general you can always take Stoppard to town philosophically. When the critics start to interfere with the play in Hound you might even get as far as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as you could wax sententious about discovering our own fantasies by acting them out, in the paradoxical and not-to-be-revealed ending of Magritte. But what is impressive is that all this is done so lightly, so cleverly, that it ought to embarrass the critic to get heavy about it. Stoppard's plots are so well devised, every funny line is so well ensconced in its context, that the critic is put in danger of being fooled himself, and looking the fool if he tries to put his hands on the heart of these plays. The only real inspector must be the spectator, on the scene.