Happy New Year MoT readers! To start off 2011 – we have a brand new theatre contest.

This week win a pair of tickets to “The Real Inspector Hound”&”After Magritte “ presented by The Alumnae Theatre Company. These are two one-act comedies , performances run from January 21, 2011.

To enter you will have to answer the following question: Who was Tom Stoppard’s co-writer on the Oscar-winning screenplay of Shakespeare in Love?

Email contests@mooneyontheatre.com, quoting the subject “The Real Inspector Hound”&”After Magritte” with your response.

Show Dates:

We have three pairs of tickets available for the night after opening: Saturday January 22.

The Show

Tony Award-winning playwright Tom Stoppard’s work is full of linguistic complexity, and his plays often deal with philosophical issues.  However, he cautions against trying to find or attach too much purpose to the one-act comedies After Magritte and The Real Inspector Hound, insisting that they “must be untouched by any suspicion of usefulness.”

After Magritte begins in a surreal fashion (like the works of the painter for which it’s named) and plays with the ideas of perception and point of view.  The story of the piece becomes gradually and hilariously comprehensible, as a dogged detective and his sidekick unravel the supposed crime of a ballroom-dancing couple.  Stoppard (born Tomás Straüssler in Czechoslovakia in 1937) mined his early career as a drama critic for The Real Inspector Hound, even adapting a character name from his own reviewer pseudonym, William Boot.  In the play, two rival theatre critics, Moon and Birdboot, become bizarrely involved in the action of the murder/mystery they have been sent to review (a spoof of Agatha Christie’s famously long-running The Mousetrap).

The winner will be announced Thursday.