Word: hounding
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...REAL INSPECTOR HOUND and AFTER MAGRITTE...
...first play, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern Are Dead, had those two pitiably bewildered title characters trying to figure out what the devil was going on in the castle at Elsinore. His new playlets are dramatic trifles compared to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the longer and better one, The Real Inspector Hound, is highly diverting. (The brief curtain raiser, After Magritte, simply reduces the deductive process to a bundle of false clues that turn the characters, as well as the lines, into absurdist non sequiturs...
...Hound's action takes place in a theater on opening night. It is a spoof of an Agatha Christie thriller, and Stoppard handles it with prankish zest, though it lacks the urbane comic polish and spine-prickling tremors that Anthony Shaffer put into his Christie takeoff, Sleuth. The subplot concerns two drama critics who observe and comment on the play and eventually get actively drawn into it at no small risk. Here Stoppard is sly and wry, and one may guess that he views critics with bemused affection and subdued contempt...
...years old now," the moonshiner said as he scratched a hound's ear. "Lived on this knob all my life." His mother still lives there too, but his father died a heroic moonshiner's death in 1951. "My daddy made his own likker," he explained, "and died at 64 on a big drunk. Stayed drunk for 13 days on his own bottles; stuff was so strong must've burned his insides...
Riots. Extortion had paid for it all. "There may well have been contemporaries of Jean de Berry," wrote Millard Meiss, "who maintained that he cared more for animals and for art than for men." They may well have been right. Jean de Berry once gave a hound a life pension, but he taxed his subjects so fiercely that they rioted. Worse, from the aspect of practical politics, he chose the wrong faction in the struggles for the French throne, so his house in Paris was sacked by a furious mob in 1411, and one of his châteaux, stuffed...