“Stark Raving Sane”

Almost 25 years after Stoppard exploded into the theatre world with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, he rewrote his own masterpiece and directed the 1990 film adaptation. The fact that Stoppard himself wrote the screenplay and directed, rather than another writer reworking the original play, makes all of the changes and contrasts between the play and film all the more striking.

The most noticeable change is the setting of the story. Where, in the play, we are told explicitly that R&G are “in a place without much visible character,” the film takes place in a series of lush, extravagant locations with a great deal of visual character. In the film, R&G wander continuously through the palace, from one room to another, instead of staying in place while the action comes to them, as is the case in the play; the play makes them into much more stagnant characters, since they cannot go anywhere for large portions of it. In the film, they can explore and move about. There is the same frustration, however, because no matter how much they move, they never seem to get anywhere; they continuously find themselves wandering in circles, as though in a labyrinth.

Rather than the action coming to them, they wind up stumbling into other scenes unintentionally. While in the play, they are at least important enough that the king continues to return and give them instructions, here they are even more of nobodies – all the action of Hamlet which they come across they find only through eavesdropping. Rather than carrying on an extended dialog to fill the time while they wait for someone to come in, as in the play, here they take momentary pauses from their dialog to note what’s happening around them before returning to their own pursuits. It makes the Hamlet plot seem even more periphery than before – only a temporary distraction. At other times, the film almost becomes a detective story, with the protagonists overhearing sinister whisperings and trying to work out the mystery, but of course, they never actually learn enough to solve the puzzle.

The aspect of the film which most bothered me was the changes to the tragedians and their plays. The climactic scene in which they reenact the end of Hamletwas moved far earlier in the movie, to the point where in the original play they limit themselves to merely elaborating on “The Murder of Gonzago” a bit. Instead, in the film, they go through the entire course of the play – which increases the sense of foreshadowing, but I felt severely undermined the impact of the final scene, which instead becomes just a montage of each of the court characters dying. I realize that what works on the stage cannot be translated easily to film, but I thought that much of the mystery, intricacy, and power of that scene was lost.

While I didn’t like the shuffled timing of the plays-within-a-play, in terms of the actual staging, I thought they were phenomenal. The dumb-show before the servants was extremely clever, and I loved the haunting effect of the masks used in the interrupted rehearsal. The inclusion of a play within the play-within-a-play, staged with puppets, gave me the sense that the story just kept going back deeper and deeper, repeating itself infinitely – like a fractal, or an object between two mirrors, reflected endlessly.

While I was disappointed with the way the final scene was handled, I did find the other transitions, such as between the acts or from one locale to another, to be very well done. The repeated themes of blowing paper and music, followed by a transition such as zooming in on the curtains of the tragedians’ cart and then zooming back out to show the curtains hanging in Elsinore, terrifically executed my understanding of Stoppard’s intention for the play – the instantaneous, almost magical passage of time and place were fascinating. The same could be said of the transition between Acts II and III, when Hamlet extinguishes the light near Polonius’ body and the next light to come up reveals them all on the boat. I also found it very interesting to see how much more of HamletStoppard included in this version, compared to the original, and which chunks of his original play he cut (a sizeable portion).

I thought that the Player’s part seemed rather diminished, since many of my favorite speeches disappeared. I did, however, love the development of Rosencrantz’s character. In the play, it is always tempting to categorize Guildenstern as the intellectual pompous one and Rosencrantz as the friendly stupid one, but in the film, without adding more than a few words of dialog, Stoppard used visual humor to flesh out Rosencrantz. He fiddles continuously with the ordinary objects around him, discovering as the film progresses gravity, at least one of Newton’s laws, volume, wind power, and the airplane. Instead of an idiot, he becomes an absent-minded professor figure – not oblivious to the political intrigue around him so much as unconcerned by it, considering his little discoveries far more intriguing than all the court babble. It’s not that he doesn’t understand what’s happening, so much as that it doesn’t bother him. Guildenstern becomes the opposite – too caught up in trying to figure out the court action to pay attention to Rosencrantz’s discoveries, despite the fact that ultimately they’d be better off if they stuck to R’s pursuits than G’s.

Some of the actors’ choices also bothered me slightly. I felt the film held no sense of urgency, none of the near-hysteria that appears at moments in the play. Even as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stand on the gallows with nooses around their necks (another thing which bothered me; what happened to death being something which can’t be acted, merely an exit and a failure to return?), I got the sense that they considered this all to be merely a nuisance and a minor irritant. Considering how much of the original play is devoted to dealing with the idea of death, how to confront it, and a person’s ability to process the implications of death, I thought the movie contained very little of those questions which were so fundamental to the play.

Overall, I liked the movie, but the vast differences between the film and play have forced me to wonder about my interpretation of the play. So much of what I considered to be a fundamental, crucial part of the play disappeared in the movie, which would be understandable if a second author had revised the play, but since the changes were all made by Stoppard himself, I have to wonder if I’m focusing my attention on the wrong aspects of the play. It’s definitely something to take into account as I move into the final stages of my study.

Although I’ve been trying to tackle the question of metatheatricality in R&G are Dead, thus far I’ve really only looked at it in terms of theatrical self-awareness bridging the gap between Stoppard’s play and the audience; I’ve yet to even touch on the abundant material provided by the plays-within-a-play or on the stagecraft of Stoppard’s play itself.

Guildenstern tells the Player, “I would prefer art to mirror life, if it’s all the same to you,” to which the Player replies, “It’s all the same to me.” Although the entire point of Shakespeare’s play-within-a-play is that it should resemble the real events preceding Hamlet, Stoppard’s tragedians take this even further, meticulously predicting all the events past and yet to come. They don’t ever say they are staging “The Murder of Gonzago,”; instead, they act out the very play they are participating in, Shakespeare’s  Hamlet, becoming not actors but almost prophets. Their play-within-a-play merges with the action of the larger play at various points, as when their rehearsal culminates in the ‘death’ of the spies and immediately transitions to the performance before the king; when the between-scenes blackout ends, the tragedians have been exactly replaced with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Something similar occurs on an even grander scale in the end, when the tragedians act out a blood bath which exactly represents Hamlet 5.2 before disappearing into a blackout only to have the raised lights reveal that the fallen tragedians have become the court members. The line between play-within-a-play and the ‘real life’ of the play gets blurred and at times completely obliterated. The connection with the tragedians – especially strong if the tragedians are deliberately paired with a particular court character – makes the court members seem like actors as well, puppets forced to fulfill the plot delineated by the tragedians, rather than the other way around.

Some of my favorite parts of this play are parts I’ve yet to see successfully staged – namely, the striking final scene when the ‘dead’ tragedians are silently replaced with the dead court. I have not had a chance to see it performed as scripted in Stoppard’s directions; the one professional production I saw used universal lighting, meaning that the tragedians’ bodies were always visible; the identity switch was managed by double casting the court members as the tragedians and having them wear their court costumes beneath the tragedians’ long cloaks. While it was effective in its own way, raising a whole new batch of questions regarding identity, it is not the author’s original staging; and although Stoppard is the first to say that plays tend to benefit from revision and should be a flexible medium, I would love to see a production done in accordance with the original stage directions.

Having access to those stage directions also highlights a question I’ve had to deal with throughout this semester’s work – the difference between reading and seeing. Reading Stoppard’s directions, the connections between Hamlet and R&G are Dead emerge even more clearly, as when he quotes entire passages from Shakespeare’s play as stage directions for his own – but without reading the play as a text, there is no way of knowing precisely what he’s doing. Plays are, ultimately, a visual and aural medium, meant to be seen and heard and acted out, not read on paper; but at the same time, Stoppard’s stage directions and asides often add a dimension to the work that may not be present if it is just watched, introducing ambiguities that open up new possibilities. The problem with the many enigmatic features of Stoppard’s writing is that in staging them, one must choose and commit to one possibility, eliminating the others.

What with the holidays and end-of-the-semester work loads, it’s been some time since I updated on my reading – but I’m back on track, and at long last, I’ve arrived at the play that started it all, both for Stoppard and for me: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Most people with any knowledge of Stoppard know him for this play, his first major success, which launched his career and which introduces so many of the themes he later went on to write about in his subsequent career: identity, metatheatricality, doubling, plays-within-plays, interlaced dialogue, plays ‘without plots’, self-knowledge, the tenuous nature of all knowledge — the list goes on and on, and every reading reveals a new level of complexity. I have personally read the text at least four times, performed it twice (therefore also watching parts of it rehearsed and performed dozens and dozens of times), and seen one professional production, and I still come across passages that have never made sense before, only to have a light bulb suddenly click on after the umpteenth time. This is the brilliance of this play – it’s bottomless, there is always yet another level below the surface.

This past summer I was fortunate enough to see a professional production, by the American Shakespeare Center’s touring company. R&G are Dead was performed in conjunction with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the actors played the same roles, with the same costumes and very similar staging and blocking, in both plays – and for the first time, I understood R&G are Dead as intricately connected with another play. I really had the sense, for the first time, that when the court exited, the action of Hamlet was continuing backstage while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern floundered on the margins. I actually read R&G are Dead before I ever read Hamlet, so I’ve always seen R&G as far more significant characters than they actually are. Watching ASC’s production really drove home the futility and pointlessness of the title characters’ roles, but at the same time, despite knowing that they would achieve absolutely nothing except dying young (and despite knowing most of the lines before they were said), I was completely engrossed.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are entertaining, witty, stupid, sarcastic, blundering, endearing, and aggravating all at once – but while each of them certainly has distinctive qualities and a personality of their own, they only function in tandem. They can be distinguished, but not separated. Even they themselves eventually lose track of their identities and can no longer remember which one of them is which. Identity becomes arbitrary, as does much of their existence. As Guildenstern points out, the confused pair has only the other characters’ words to rely on to help them determine the truth about their situation. This allows them to distance themselves from their actions and the consequences, because they are merely following directions. This distancing indirectly leads to their own destruction – their callous refusal to save Hamlet by intervening and going against the events already set in motion eventually causes their own deaths. As Guildenstern points out, “there must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said – no.” They’ve in fact had multiple moments to change the course of events, the last and most important being the moment when they opened the warrant for Hamlet’s death, but chose to do nothing to save their friend.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern choose as well to do nothing to save themselves. There is no reason, informed as they are by reading the second letter, that they could not flee and save themselves, but they go willingly to the English court and their deaths. They have nowhere else to go, nothing else to do – their only function is completed. This is one of the many moments in the play when the metatheatrical nature of plays breaks through the fourth wall and overtakes the internal world of the play. R&G can do nothing to save themselves because that is how they are written: they have no freewill because they are fictional characters with a given task to perform. They cannot change the course of events because the events are controlled from outside their world, by the playwrights. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of course, have only the vaguest grasp on this concept; all they know is that they have little or no control over the course of events. The one character who seems to have some insight into the order of things is the Player.

The Player has always been my favorite character, despite his rather dubious morality and general sleaziness. The Player lives his life on the principal that ‘all the world’s a stage,’ and thus is the only character with any comprehension that they’re all actors in a play. His snide comments on the acting profession – “We’re actors - we’re the opposite of people!” – and his reply to Guildenstern’s concern that R&G don’t know how to act (behave): “Act natural.” – all are laden with a double meaning – they resonate not just for the Player and his tragedians within their exhibitions, but also for all of the characters in the larger play. He comments that the actors “pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was.” This seems to be at the heart of R&G’s problems. They surrender their identities in order to fill their role in the court intrigue: if they were in Hamlet, they would exit, no longer watched or seen by the audience, and resume an identity upon reentering – but unfortunately for them, they’re left on stage and the audience continues watching, and they now have no identity of their own remaining.

It is the Player who points out the reason that R&G have no control over their fate, even when it seems they have a chance to change the course of events:

“It is written…We follow directions – there is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.”

Although they are part of a comedy rather than a tragedy, the Player’s statement holds true: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and their fellow characters can never change the events of their story. They are unfortunate in that they are just self-aware enough to realize the futility and their powerlessness. The Player and tragedians, accustomed to obeying something scripted and beyond their control, are complacent – it is enough for them just to let things happen as they will and trust in fate. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are far less easy, but just as powerless. They can do nothing more than the tragedians to control their fates – they are constrained, carried away by the action of a story they have no control over:

“We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we more idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation…We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…”

As chance would have it, William and Mary’s Theatre department chose this semester to perform Stoppard’s translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.  I hadn’t planned things this way, but the timing couldn’t be better! Though the play is obviously not original material for Stoppard, after watching the play, it is easy to see why he might be drawn to translate this work.

 Like many of Stoppard’s own plays, Chekhov’s play is about creative people, actors and writers and artists, their twisted relationships, their struggle to find truth, and to justify their work to the world. Constantin’s struggle to define the art of the future must certainly appeal to a playwright who has written so many plays (Artist Descending a Staircase, Travesties) depicting similar-minded characters attempting to break through conventions and find the real meaning of art. Constantin makes the same argument as Annie in The Real Thing- that the professional artists such as Trigorin or Henry have made themselves into an elite and have blocked anyone who might disagree with them – they hold creation as something for the chosen few, and no one else can be an initiate. They place constraints on art and attempt to fit every artist into their narrow categories. In some ways, Chekhov’s play even prefigures Stoppards’ own – as when Chekhov’s characters discuss Constantin’s play which is ‘all lines, no action’ – an accusation frequently leveled against Stoppard. Chekhov employs a number of Stoppard’s favorite devices, such as the play-within-a-play. Stoppard’s frequent portrayals of the search for identity appear here in characters such as Constantin and Nina.

Chekhov considered The Seagull to be a comedy, despite what the audience might think – rather similar to Stoppard’s take on a number of his own plays, which he maintains were written to be comedies and should be taken as such, despite what might seem a tragic ending.

With any work-in-translation there is always the question of how much content comes from the original author and how much from the translation. I would be curious to see if other translations contain as many parallels to Stoppard’s plays as Stoppard’s translation does, or whether Stoppard tweaked the language to play up his favorite ideas. Regardless, it’s fascinating to see what parallels emerge between the two playwrights writing almost a century apart.

Stoppard adapted Rough Crossing from The Play at the Castleby late-19th/early-20th century Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar. Frustratingly, I’ve had a difficult time finding any information on Molnar’s original; ironically, the only information I can find is that it was adapted by Tom Stoppard. Stoppard himself, however, describes it as “freely adapted,” and other than the device of naming the ship “S.S. Italian Castle,” it’s unclear what similarities there are between the two plays. I was curious to know how closely Stoppard followed the original; whether he was constrained by the older play’s plot, or if he merely took the bare bones of the plot and unconstrainedly played with them.

At first reading, Crossing seems to lack many of Stoppard’s most common devices – questions of identity, confusion of identity, manipulations of time, etc. However, on closer examination, some of these elements do appear, merely in a more restrained, less over-the-top manner which is more in keeping with the overall character of the play: it is a realistic play in the sense that, while it is funny, it is not absurd in the manner of some other Stoppard plays such as After Magritte. While the action all proceeds chronologically, we do see a manipulation of time through Adam’s speech impediment, which leaves him perpetually half a minute in the past. Gal and Turai also present the classic Stoppard ‘buddy pair’, earlier seen in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Moon and Birdboot, or Carr and Tzara – a pair of men almost perpetually together, neither of whom seems entirely complete without the other, who serve as foils for each other.

The prevailing trope here as in other Stoppard plays (and the reason I selected this lesser-known play) is the play-within-a-play.  Unlike in previous plays where life eerily imitates art, here art is specifically constructed to mirror life. Where Birdboot and Moon or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find themselves straying into already extant plays which resemble the circumstances of their lives, Turai deliberately constructs a play to mimic a real-life scene which has already taken place. There is the typical blending of characters between the play-within-a-play and the external play, but unlike Hound or R&G, the confusion of layered characters is still entirely contained within the four walls of the stage – while the play-within-a-play is present, it’s not metatheatrical in the same sense as many of his other writings. The characters of Natasha, Ivor, and cohorts have no awareness that they’re appearing in any play other than The Cruise of the Dodo.

The Real Thing is the closest thing to realism yet to be seen in Stoppard’s writing. It includes little of the absurdity which characterizes earlier plays such as Hound, Dogg/Cahoot, or Magritte, proceeds linearly rather than playing tricks with time, and makes no side trips into memory or senility as with Artist or Travesties. It is set in the present day and concerns ordinary people and the dramas of their daily lives. The title explains it all: this is ‘the real thing.’ However, although this play is in many ways more straightforward than other Stoppard plays, at least superficially, it still exhibits many familiar characteristics of Stoppard’s previous writing; most importantly, doubling and meta-theatricality.

Stoppard deliberately crafts his scenes to mimic each other, with the general circumstances and physical set-up remaining the same while the characters change places. The initial scene between Max and Charlotte is recreated later with Max and Annie and also with Annie and Henry. Annie and Bill’s train scene is re-performed later in the play, and is in itself a recreation of Annie and Brodie’s original interaction. Relationships are doubled as the characters cheat, separate, and come together again.

Writing a play about theatrical professionals gives Stoppard the perfect opportunity to play with one of his favorite devices, meta-theatricality. In the first scene, we immediately fall into Stoppard’s trap – we have no way of knowing that Charlotte and Max are enacting a play-within-a-play. We are meant to take them for ‘the real thing,’ and we do, at least until the dialogue in the 2^nd scene gradually reveals the trick. He uses the same trick in Annie’s acting scenes – on the train, and her rehearsals with Billy. It is difficult to know when the actors are playing characters who are acting, and when those characters stop acting. Most of the play-within-a-play devices are self-contained scenes with a clear ending, while the ‘reality’ scenes, once recognized as such, also remain entirely in ‘reality’ and free of acting; however, at some points – such as Scene 8 between Annie and Billy – acting and reality merge, and the distinction is ambiguous enough that the director could chose where to draw the line.

The Real Thing is also the first instance in Stoppard’s writing to treat more than a momentary romance. Although a love affair is key to the plot of Artist, there the potential dies before the relationship can take off, and we see only the tragic remnants of a frustrated passion. In this play, though love affairs turn sour, the lovers carry on; the story does not end with the demise of one relationship, as with Artist. Annie and Max break up, Annie and Henry struggle, Annie and Bill get together, Annie and Henry repair their relationship, Charlotte and Max both move on – the connections are alive and continue to change, rather than remaining frozen. This is part of what convinces the audience that this is indeed ‘the real thing,’ a slice of real life – it is not constrained by the stage, we see that the story and the characters go on after the curtain comes down.

I found Henry to be an amazing character. He knows Annie is serially unfaithful, but his willingness to accept that as the terms on which they are together shows how much he really loves her. I thought his discussion of jealousy and the futility of it is what Stoppard intends to be the indicator of real love, and hearing Henry voice those views only makes his struggle to control those feelings more poignant; his struggle makes clear that his love for Annie is ‘the real thing.’

The prominent role of the play-within-a-play in Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth immediately draws parallels to The Real Inspector Hound. Several traits in Cahoot especially recall Hound; namely, the Inspector, but also the blurring of action within the play-within-a-play – the action of Shakespeare’s Macbeth – and in the wings – or in this case, the living room where Macbeth is being performed. Like in Hound, external action such as Easy’s nervous appearances seamlessly integrates with the action of the play –as when Stoppard slyly uses Easy to explain the presence of the mysterious 3^rd Murderer who has baffled Shakespeare scholars for centuries.

The structure of the work as two separate but inseparable plays is intriguing. The common element bridging the two is Easy with his lorry, and his inadvertent transmission of Dogg. Cahoot is incomprehensible without having already seen Easy at work and understanding the nature of the language he uses. However, the two halves of the play approach Shakespeare from radically different view points. For Dogg’s students, Shakespeare is a dead language and a chore, completely meaningless. For Cahoot and cohorts, the play is an escape, full of hidden meanings and subversion.

In Dogg’s Hamlet, Dogg simply appears to be a bizarre foreign language in which all the words sound like English words. In Cahoot, however, it becomes ‘a clinical condition.’ Easy contracts it in a moment of extreme agitation in the first play and then passes it on to all the characters of the second. Even the Inspector may possibly have fallen victim, though we cannot be certain, since the sounds he makes in his last lines have appropriate meanings in both Dogg and English. The characters of Cahoot quickly learn to interpret Easy’s Dogg and use it to their advantage to continue their production without the Inspector’s approval. The Dogg Macbeth, however, prods him into furious action, indicating that the actual words they speak are irrelevant, everything depends upon the perceived intent.

One issue I ran into while reading the play, which could hopefully be answered were I to see it performed, is Cahoot’s brief episode of dog-like behavior. I could not decide from the written lines whether the character of Cahoot began to act like a dog, the character of Cahoot was actually transformed into a dog, or whether the actor playing Cahoot also portrays a dog. The inspector’s reaction – “Sit! Here, boy!” (193) and ‘Macbeth’s’remark that Cahoot “been made a non-person” (194) suggest that somehow the person Cahoot has been changed into a dog who can declaim Shakespeare – changed by the Inspector’s inhuman treatment of him.

I was extremely struck by one seemingly insignificant comment made by the oppressive Inspector in Cahoot. In the midst of a speech on all the ways he’s suppressed dissidents, he casually remarks, “between you and me and these three walls” (194 – my italics), which jars with the standard phrase ‘between these four walls.’ The most common scenario where it makes sense to imagine only three walls is in the theatre, where the ‘fourth wall’ is the intangible, invisible, imaginary barrier on the side of the stage separating the audience and the playing space. Within the context of the play, it makes no sense to speak of a room with three walls; Cahoot and company are performing in a living room, not on a theatrical stage. The Inspector’s remark instantly suggests that he is somehow aware of the fact that the living room he traverses with the other characters is part of a larger existence embedded in a theatre; somehow he knows they are all characters in a play.

When I designed my study, I decided to tackle my chosen plays in roughly the order they were written (though I chose to leave R&G are Dead until the end of the semester because a) I am far more familiar with that work than any other, b)far more critical literature exists on this than on any other play, and c) that being Stoppard’s most well-known work, I think it would be a fitting summation of the study to treat it last).  I started by rereading a play I’d encountered in high school and was astounded by: The Real Inspector Hound.

 A word of warning: I will treat this blog as though anyone reading it has read the play in question and is familiar with the plot. If knowing the ending will spoil your enjoyment of the play, I apologize, but this is ultimately a piece of academic writing, and I can’t obscure details of the plot without interfering with my ability to discuss the play. You’ve been forewarned!

____________________________________________________________

 “It is merely that it is not enough to wax at another’s wane, to be held in reserve, to be on hand, on call, to step in or not at all, the substitute – the near offer – the temporary-acting – for I am Moon, continuous Moon, in my own shoes, Moon in June, April, September and no member of the human race keeps warm my bit of space.” The Real Inspector Hound

__________________________________________________________________ 

Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound blurs the lines between spectator and actor to an alarming degree. The fate of Moon and Birdboot should leave the audience faintly nervous and concerned that something similar might happen to them, especially because the true mystery in this play is exactly what happens to the two unfortunate critics. Seemingly, Moon, Birdboot, and Higgs are all murdered in a clever plot by the third-string critic Puckeridge, but their deaths leave a lot of questions.

In my opinion the crux of the problem is figuring out when the actors the critics are watching are playing their assigned characters in the Muldoon Manor mystery and when, if ever, they are acting of their own volition and their personal wants merely happen to align with what the mystery character wants – as when Puckeridge/Magnus shoots Moon/‘Hound’.

Why don’t the actors performing the play-within-a-play react when Moon and Birdboot change places with Simon and Hound? Has Moon’s place been stolen by The Actor Playing Hound, or has the fictional Hound somehow stepped out of the play and forced Moon to change places with him? The fact that Simon and Hound usurp the critics’ seats and roles suggests that they are conspirators against Moon, not merely unwitting dupes, as Cynthia or Felicity seem to be. However, in a situation where Stoppard’s audience would expect the actresses to drop their Muldoon Manor characters and reveal The Actresses Playing Cynthia and Felicity, their unfaltering continuation of Cynthia and Felicity leaves one wondering if they are capable of dropping character, or if they have no existence other than within the play-within-a-play; can they join Moon or later The Actors Playing Simon and Hound on the other side of the footlights to observe the stage? The other alternative to their unblinking acceptance of Moon’s death is that they are accomplices. Presumably Puckeridge has plotted his murder to imitate the action in the Muldoon Manor script; but this does not explain how an unpredictable factor like the phone call to Birdboot could be included in the action of the Muldoon Manor Play, unless the play were written specifically for the purpose of drawing in the critics. In that case, even Myrtle would have to be an accomplice, which perhaps makes some sense given Birdboot’s philandering.  In fact, the events of the play-within-a-play only make sense if it is Birdboot and Moon, rather than Simon and Hound, who act them out. This conclusion, however, raises in turn the question of whether Stoppard intends the play to have a logical solution which can be reasoned out, or if we are just supposed to suspend our disbelief and accept that what we are seeing is characters stumbling from ‘reality’ into fiction and vice versa.

Is Stoppard’s audience watching a play about critics watching a play, or are they watching two separate stories in which the characters are plucked out of their plot and rearranged in another ‘reality’? The nature of the play-within-a-play and the inability to distinguish how many levels of acting are presented makes it impossible to answer this question beyond any doubt. Puckeridge gets away with murder because no one, inside Hound or watching it, can be sure that they have witnessed Puckeridge kill his colleagues, and not merely seen the real Inspector Hound executing his duties.