"The Real Inspector Hound" written by Tom Stoppard

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Portfolio unit 2 “the real inspector hound”

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For this unit, the play which we are studying is “The Real Inspector Hound” written by Tom Stoppard, an English playwright famous for his clever use of language and ironic political metaphors. Stoppard was associated , and often his play referred to the meaninglessness of the human condition. He combined the English tradition of the “comedy of manners” (a play that attacks the customs of the upper classes) with contemporary social concerns by concentrating on the intricate and comical duplicities of everyday conversation within a wider, and often menacing, historical perspective.

Stoppard focuses on having fun with different theatrical conventions such as the forth wall and seen on stage and what is not (the body).

The topic for our first assessed session was exposition, the strategise, used were role play, Marking the moment in addition to still image. The medium of the section was Language Gesture as well as Action.

Foremost we were position into four groups of four to select and rehearse what we felt was the superlative text on show, this introduced us to the two different kinds of exposition ;( Moon & Birdboot and Simon & Mrs Drudge). Our aim for this exercise was to understand the different uses of exposition; the very easy, flowing, subtle exposition of Moon and Birdboot compared to the ‘in your face’ comic exposition of Mrs Drudge. To do this we first read through the text in our for , this had already been read thought to us although it became clear we had little understanding of it, by acting the scenes we were bringing them to life, Therefore increasing our understanding of the play.

We decided to create Moon and Birdboots scene in a very realistic way to do this we used, gesture and action; their gestures were subtle and unobvious and their actions were very slow, we also made sure however that they were realistic characters by hot seating, a method we also used for Simon and Mrs Drudge this was very useful as we did not know the characters very well and it enabled us to understand their life’s and therefore the gestures and actions they would have. For Mrs Drudge we made sure she had bad posture(hunched) had starring eyes, and spoke her long paragraphs of exposition very quickly and exaggerating the key sentences such as “ This is all very mysterious, I am sure it is leading up to something” This became comic and that was the intention of Stoppard. He is using this over exaggerated exposition to mock play writers of his time. It is important to use exposition in the first scene of any play so that the audience understands the play however, some play writers try and cram too much exposition into the first scene causing it to sound pushed and unnatural, this is what Stoppard was mocking “including Magnus the wheelchair- ridden half brother of her ladyship’s husband lord Albert Muldoon who ten years ago. . . .” When this quote was read by our Mrs Drudge with the gestures, actions we had described it create the exact effect we thought Stoppard wanted.

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We decided to move the stage directions a little as we found that the position of the critics (at the back of the stage, behind the actors) made it hard for the audience to see them we therefore moved them to the far right half way down the stage this therefore went that the critics were nearer the audience, almost part of it which was the intention of Stoppard.

We then rehearsed the scene with the critics, Mrs Drudge and Simon. I was Simon and after the hot seating I had decided that I was a very nervous character ...

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