Hilo Community Players stage Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound at Keawe Theater

Downtown Hilo has a compact night out that mixes murder-mystery polish with pure theatrical mischief. Hilo Community Players opened Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound on Friday at The Keawe Theater, giving local audiences a chance to see one of modern comedy’s sharpest spoofs close to home through May 10.

The play centers on two theater critics, Birdboot and Moon, who arrive expecting a conventional country-house whodunit and instead get pulled into the action themselves. The result is a fast-moving farce that keeps blurring the line between audience and actor, with mistaken identities, abrupt turns and the kind of escalating confusion Stoppard built his reputation on. Theon Weber and Casey Simpson play the critics at the center of the chaos, while David Greene, Sarah Elliott, Ray Ryan, Miriam Hoenig, Rachel Klein and Mark Lewis fill out the mystery world around them.

Director Sean Douglas has shaped the production to lean into both the elegance and the absurdity of the form. Concord Theatricals describes The Real Inspector Hound as a 75-minute spoof of Agatha Christie-style melodramas, and that pacing matters at The Keawe Theater, where the show moves quickly enough to feel like a game of cat and mouse but still leaves room for Stoppard’s sharper jokes about fate, free will and the limits of observation. It is the kind of production that works because the audience can see the mechanism behind the comedy even as the trap closes around the characters.

For Hilo Community Players, the production also fits a much longer local story. The group says it has been doing theater since 1938 and calls itself the oldest theater company on Hawaii Island, with a mission to educate, enrich and inspire the Big Island community through quality theatrical productions, workshops and activities for children, teens and adults. Staging Stoppard at a downtown Hilo venue reinforces that role, putting ambitious material in front of island audiences without sending them to Oahu or the mainland for a taste of classic theatrical wit.

Performances run through May 10 at The Keawe Theater, 280 Keawe St. in Hilo. Shows are scheduled for Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. General admission is $20 in advance and $5 more at the door, making the run an accessible way to spend an evening downtown with one of theater’s most clever comedy-mysteries.