Word: birdboot
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...Birdboot and Moon, as Stoppard has named the critics, have obsessions that dominate their thinking throughout the night. Moon is a second-string critic crazy with hatred for the first-string. "Perhaps he's dead at last, or trapped in a lift somewhere or succumbed to amnesia, wandering the land with his turn-ups stuffed with ticket stubs," he muses. Birdboot is interested only in ogling young starlets and keeping smut out of the theatre. Fulfilling what must be every playwright's ultimate fantasy, Stoppard uses the self-centered antics of these two to mock the whole business of theatre...
...critics half-way between the stage and the real audience--because of the theatre's seating arrangement we don't realize that the man assiduously reading his program and taking notes of the set before the play begins is actually part of the cast. Only with the arrival of Birdboot, clad in yellow, green and plaid and munching on chocolates, does the audience get its first hint that something unusual is afoot. The pair discusses Higgs, the first-string, and launches us into a fast-paced, clever hour-and-a-half's entertainment which only occasionally verges on the flip...
...other players do well in their roles, although only Lewis Goldman as the vulgar Birdboot and Fatima Mahdi as the terrifically sinister Mrs. Drudge ("The fog is very treacherous around here--it rolls off the sea without warning, shrouding the cliffs in a deadly mantle of blind man's bluff...") manage to match Edelstein's spirit...
...English for a decade. But I think he may have something against critics in general, having once been one himself, before his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern broke on the London theater scene. Perhaps he shares reviewer-character Moon's jealousy of the first stringer who overshadows him, or reviewer-character Birdboot's moral outrage at other critic's criticism of his rather intense interest in a new actress each opening night. All I know is that one feels it wise to be on one's best critical behavior, for safety's sake, in inspecting a play like The Real Inspector Hound...
...makes each man a very different type, and he is wickedly on target with both. Birdboot (Tom Lacy) is an expansive, chocolate-munching show-bird chaser who finds almost everything "a rattling good show." Moon (David Rounds) is an emotionally constipated, intellectually rabid exegete; any wispy pile of dramatic dandruff can fuel his fire about "the human condition...
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