Stand in and be Counted

Abstract

Making the ignominious eponymous, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) combines elements of two plays by giving Shakespeare’s characters the lead parts in a transplanted Waiting for Godot (where, of course, the title character is never seen at all). Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, which had its premiere in 1968, is also set in someone else’s theatre, and again highlights two marginal figures, the critics Birdboot and Moon, who have been sent by their papers to review a murder mystery. One of the two is more marginal than the other, as we immediately find out, because Moon is a second-string irked by lack of recognition. It is not enough, he complains, ‘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’. Stoppard himself had been substitute theatre critic of the Bristol Evening World, while dreaming of being a foreign correspondent. As he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, however, he soon found the boot was on both feet, when he was taken on by Scene magazine as not only the number one critic but also his own second-string. ‘Being short of money’, he told Mel Gussow in April 1972, ‘the magazine had this critic Tom Stoppard and a man named William Boot who wrote about the theatre. I was both of them’—although the pseudonym had previously had another role, as the accidental foreign correspondent in Evelyn Waugh’s farcical novel Scoop.1