Most plays have stage directions to guide the director and actors as well as readers. Comedies use repetition to make the audience laugh. Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound (1968) uses both stage directions and repetition in unusual and funny ways. In this play, different kinds of stage directions add to the humor, usually with repetitions that don't seem to make sense. Further, the stage directions go beyond what is necessary for performing the play. Some of the italicized words crack jokes for the reader, and sometimes what would usually be in the printed script is spoken aloud by characters. One of the characters, Mrs. Drudge, is a major source of this ridiculous repetition, as to what she says and the stage directions of what she does. The Real Inspector Hound is a really complicated play that needs to be read again and again to be fully understood. A reader can reread and compare the stage directions that connect the murder mystery at Muldoon Manor with the play about the theater critics Moon and Birdboot.
The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, and it also makes fun of theater critics and plays that have a "play-within-the-play" (Ridgeway, Hodgson, Stoppard, "Conversation"). This is a device that Shakespeare used in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream (Ridgeway). A frame and an inner play usually mirror each other, with comic results. The printed play of The Real Inspector Hound makes it more obvious that there is a frame or a mirroring of an inside and an outside play. This is something that you wouldn't notice in a theater. It begins with several paragraphs in italics that no one in the theater would read. What a live audience would see is something like "their own reflection." Stoppard's note declares: "Impossible" (1395); no mirror could really reflect everyone sitting in the actual seats. The reader knows that Stoppard describes the set of the play-within-the-play as a realistic drawing room, and knows that Stoppard instructs directors to cast two different types, "plumpish middle-aged Birdboot and younger taller, less-relaxed Moon" (1395).