It is a parody of the stereotypical parlour mystery in the style of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap,[2] as well as of the critics watching the play, with their personal desires and obsessions interwoven into their bombastic and pompous reviews.
The play is set, as announced by Mrs. Drudge when answering the telephone, in the "drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring".
Birdboot – a theatre critic and a womaniser, who catapults young actresses to stardom by delivering dazzling reviews in return, we assume, for sexual favours.
The company splits up to look for a man of suspicion, when Simon is left alone on stage with the body, he bends over it and seems to recognise the victim, at which point he is shot by an unknown assailant.
Birdboot speaks to her and as he hangs up, the play suddenly starts again and he gets trapped in it, mistaken for Simon, leading to his inevitable demise as he executes the role to its end, just after recognising the dead body onstage as Higgs, the first string critic who was unavailable that night.
As Moon lies dying on the floor, Magnus reveals himself to not only be the real Inspector Hound but also Cynthia's lost husband, Albert, who had disappeared ten years earlier.
The first performance of The Real Inspector Hound took place at the Criterion Theatre in London on 17 June 1968 with the cast as follows: The play was directed by Robert Chetwyn, while the design was completed by Hutchinson Stott.
[4] A Chicago Reader reviewer wrote in 2010 that Stoppard's script "[opens] out beyond satire to express the strange elation, identification, and even erotic fascination any audience member can feel in the dark.
"[5] The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer said that The Real Inspector Hound "brilliantly nails the clichés of the reviewer's craft and the bitter jealousies of this grubby profession".
"[9] The Tab's Jamie P. Robson dubbed The Real Inspector Hound "an intricate pleasure [...] Myriad elements of the job are fantastically satirised: the bombast, the pretentiousness, the over-intellectual analyses".
Robson argued that it "escalates into chaotic brilliance [...] when the critics step through the fourth wall [...] the unstoppable progress of the play-within-the-play to its twist-filled ending is as hilarious as it is magnetic.
"[10] In 2016, Kate Wingfield of Metro Weekly dubbed it "very fun to be with", writing that "it is Moon’s bafflement that carries the humor and the tenor of Stoppard’s grand design.
[15] The Guadalajara Reporter staff wrote, "A classic of the English comic tradition, this play weaves together parody, pastiche and punning to create a wonderfully entertaining and ingenious one-act comedy.
"[16] Zoe Paskett of Evening Standard listed it as one of Stoppard's five finest works (the others being Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing, and Arcadia).
[17] Conversely, Jan Herman stated in a 1991 review for Los Angeles Times that The Real Inspector Hound "is little more than a mannered cuckoo clock of a comedy".
Deriding the script as "overdone", Herman argued, "What humor [Stoppard's allusions] still have depends less on recognition of the particular details he has borrowed from Christie’s play than on a more general idea of the traditional conventions of the well-made thriller.
"[18] Jess M. Bravin of The Harvard Crimson judged the character development and story to be less impressive than the dialogue, and criticized the way that a 1987 Dunster House production "ponderously [followed] every twist in the script.