Guthrie goes for critical mass with double feature

The cast of The Real Inspector Hound (Photo by Scott Suchman).

Nobody likes a critic, but artists are in a unique position to strike back beyond letters to the editor wondering if the writer in question had "seen the same show."

Playwrights classic and modern get their digs in the Guthrie's double header of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's (by way of Jeffrey Hatcher) The Critic and Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. Yet for all the jabs directed the ink-stained set, much of the humor in the pair comes at the expense of theater itself.

The pieces come to the Guthrie by way of Washington D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company, where they were first produced, for a mostly delightful evening of wild comedy.

In The Critic, Sheridan sets up a farce where a pair of critics (the lovely named Mr. Dangle and Mr. Sneer) take down an aspiring colleague -- Mr. Puff -- by encouraging him to adapt and twist his new play to the supposed whims of the unseen Sheridan himself.

Their commands sound like demented improv games. Sheridan, they tell Puff, can't abide Spanish names. That's a problem, as the play is about the Spanish Armada. Poor Puff and his sorry cast has to work on the fly to remove the name of the hero at every turn, with increasingly comic effect.

While bad acting and overcooked historical dramas are the name of the game in The Critic, it's the English country-house murder-mystery on the dock for The Real Inspector Hound.

This time, we have a pair of critics, Moon and Birdboot, watching a dreadful English country-house murder mystery. While the Noises-off-like disaster plays out on stage, the pair find themselves drawn into the action, eventually taking over in the show, while a pair of the former characters sit and watch them act out the show.

So, typically Stoppard, but well played and produced. It's the stronger half of the evening, though both offer plenty of fun. There's just a bit more bite to what Stoppard has to say, though the outright comedy side belongs to The Critic.

The Critic and The Real Inspector Hound run through March 27 at the Guthrie Theater.