Our Heroes Meet Again

By Jane Horwitz
April 19, 2011

“Torture — it’s agony,” jests director John Vreeke when asked what it’s like to reunite with veteran actors Ralph Cosham, John Dow and Michael Tolaydo. In spring 2009, he directed them at MetroStage in a well-received production of “Heroes.” The play by French dramatist Gerald Sibleyras, translated and adapted by Tom Stoppard, featured the actors as cranky World War I veterans finding friendship in an old soldiers’ home.

Now he’s directing them in another Stoppard play, an early-career farce, “The Real Inspector Hound,” running Wednesday night through May 29 at MetroStage. Turning to the three actors during a rehearsal break, the director asks, “How many years between the three of you — experience — do you have? Three hundred and fifty years?” He adds dryly, “It’s all about keeping the insults going.”

Vreeke had suggested the play to Producing Artistic Director Carolyn Griffin as a vehicle for bringing the three actors back together, albeit this time within a larger cast that includes well-known Washington actors Catherine Flye, Kimberly Gilbert and Emily Townley.

Stoppard’s play and its play-within-a-play spoofs stage whodunits like Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap,” as well as pretentious theater critics. It opens with a corpse on the floor in the drawing room of Muldoon Manor — a body no one notices for half the play.

Cosham and Tolaydo play theater critics Moon and Birdboot, who sit at the far end of the stage, facing the murder mystery that’s unfolding before them and also facing the audience. They comment on the performance and digress extensively into Birdboot’s philandering ways and Moon’s inferiority complex about being a second-string critic at his paper. Playing someone with an inferiority complex “requires a great deal of acting on my part,” Cosham observes.

Dow plays Magnus, who, he explains, is “a heavily disguised cripple that we later realize is . . .” well, that would be telling. Suffice it to say that Magnus is “a guy in disguise, in disguise, in disguise . . . so I don’t know what I’m doing,” the actor concludes.

For Tolaydo, playing the more self-confident, if equally clueless, critic Birdboot is not an act of revenge. “I don’t think of critics as the enemy, but I don’t read them, if I can help it, until after.” And not even then, if he can avoid it, he says.