166th season marked with a double bill

The Real Inspector Hound and Ways and Means, The Old Stagers, Gulbenkian Theatre

For its 166th season, the world’s oldest amateur dramatic society – in a nod to its roots – performed two, one-act plays, both directed by Ricky Ritchie.

The Real Inspector Hound is vintage 1960s Stoppard – hitting a range of targets like an MIRV missile, while playing a succession of games with – and upon – its audience.

Brilliantly satirising both Christie-type murder mysteries and two familiar types of theatre critic (while giving a huge hint of the plot of The Mousetrap ), it is a complex souffle of perceptual shifts, playing expertly with the audience’s heads.

Alex Knight was selfimportance personified as Moon, the Guardianista critical bore; Julian Date as the lecherous and corrupt Birdboot made sure his death near the end was deeply satisfactory to all. Oscar Ratcliffe was convincingly unconvincing as the less-than-real Hound; Andrew Ross leaped from his wheelchair at the end with eclat, not to say elan.

Really, the star was Kate Robertson as Mrs Drudge; the cleaning lady who potters around and among the action, explaining, reacting and (scenestealingly) dusting. Stoppard can be proud of them all.

Ways and Means, a Coward play from the 1930s, was designed as a vehicle for him and Gertrude Lawrence. Delightfully ( if worryingly ) amoral, it centres on an upperclass, bitchy and impecunious couple facing financial and social meltdown. Seizing on a lucky chance when catching an out-of-work chauffeur who tries to burgle them, they connive with him to burgle a rich American.

They will live happily ever after (until they next run out of money). Coward’s gay links with “rough trade” as it was then known gives this a certain knowing frisson.

West End star Venetia Twigg and Benedict Payne did an expert Taylor and Burton as Lawrence/coward ( er... Stella and Toby Cartwright ), while Gubby Wales as their glamorous but insincere landlady made it clear that they had no real friends.

The Epilogue was – traditionally – heavily political. Written this year by Jo Hanbury, it was light, very funny – and occasionally vicious. There’s no better satire anywhere of the bizarre Corbynista love-fest among (presumably) stoned-to-theeyeballs, no-longer-young potheads at Glastonbury. And for bald men everywhere, Philip Robinson’s beautifully sung lament will be comfort to the soul. Jack Wales