A RAre double bill of Early Stoppard superbly performed
Posted on 20th March 2026
Director Paul Baker has gathered his A team together for Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound with some of the finest acting talent RoughCast Theatre Company has to offer. The play is a typical Stoppard, full of twists and meta commentary, all packed into an economical run time of just over an hour.
No doubt keen to give their healthy sized audience value for money, the company started the evening with something akin to a support slot. A Separate Peace was written for television in the mid-sixties, reportedly to accompany a BBC documentary about chess players. It’s an opaque drama about a man who books himself into a hospital despite being well, and then books himself out again. It’s a minor work that, but for Stoppard’s reputation, would surely have been lost to the passage of time. What set apart RoughCast’s production was a superb central performance from Grant Filshill, as the patient John Brown, whose inscrutable need for isolation is helped along the way by a nicely underplayed Barry Givens as a bewildered doctor and a classic matronly turn from Pat Parris. Nothing much happens, or indeed is explained, which is more than be said for The Real Inspector Hound.
There are explanations aplenty from Simon Evans and Peter Long, the double act we didn’t realise we’ve all been waiting for. The two of them have great fun delivering Stoppard’s withering deconstruction of theatre criticism. The grotesque lasciviousness of Long’s character hasn’t aged well, even as a comic device, but Evans’s outpouring of pretention still rings horribly true. Has there ever been, Stoppard seems to be saying, a more pompous, pointless way to waste words that someone banging on about their reaction to a play? Oh dear. What they are reviewing is a play within a play that they, and we, are watching. The cast of the first half also pop up again, most notable of which is the spiky, barbed relationship between Sara Curtis and Sarah Yaxley, the latter displaying a particularly fine talent for absurdist comedy. This being Stoppard, matters swiftly become increasingly convoluted as the play turns in on itself. To say more would be to spoil much of the fun, though I will say Mark Burridge is remarkably adept when it comes to driving a wheelchair, with or without a moustache.
This was a jolly revival of a typically convoluted, and somewhat dated, offering from Stoppard that was elevated by a first rate cast, tightly directed.