The play-within-the-play parody in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound

Abstract EN

Drawing on a descriptive-analytic approach, the paper tackles Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound (1968) as a play-within-the-play parody of the English whodunnit in general and of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap (1952) in particular.

The Mousetrap, which has broken records by becoming the longest running play in the history of London's West End since its debut in 1952, established Christie (the novelist, short story writer, and poet) as a playwright in the public eye.

Stoppard's Hound, an absurdist two-act farce drawing upon the play-within-the-play conventions familiar to audiences of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, shows how Stoppard's work is exaggerating the style and content, and playing especially on the original.

The paper has reached two findings.

First, Stoppard parodies the predictability and hackneyed mechanism of the English whodunnit represented by Christie's The Mousetrap, as one of the most celebrated whodunnits in English literature, by means of his exceptional technique of the play-within-the-play parody.

Second, by implication, the same author parodies theatre critics' jealousies, subjective judgments, and pompous pronouncements by means of the text-to-critic parody through the same technique of the play-within-the-play.