CR: Last month, Tom Stoppard's play, The Real Thing, returned to Broadway after nearly 20 years. It is said to be one of his most personal works. It tells the story of Henry, a playwright, and his second wife, Annie, an actress for whom he left his first wife. It explores such themes as love, marriage, friendship, and betrayal. Ben Brantley of the NY Times calls it an elegant comedy of infidelity, and here is a clip.
(They show a clip from The Real Thing, part of the last scene of Act One)
(After the clip, Jennifer is sitting at a table with Charlie Rose and Stephen Dillane. She is wearing a black pantsuit with a white shirt, Stephen Dillane is wearing a black jacket over a brown shirt.)
CR (turning to Stephen Dillane): You said about Stoppard, the play is so solid and vividly constructed, you just have to turn up and get the lines in the right force.
SD: More or less. Yeah.
CR: More or less, I would think less - you do a lot more than that.
SD: Well...
CR: Some lines can give you a rise like others can't.
SD: That's right. And I think the more we've done it, the more being in the bigger spaces, the more we find that if you really say the lines, if you really speak the words, as opposed to kind of glancing onto the words, it's a tricky thing, but I think in the smaller space, we started off by trying to work out the relationships where these words would sort of be riding along on the top, and you kind of glance off of them all the time. I don't know if that makes any sense. But the more you get into a bigger space, the more you have to become the words, and then it's true, you get onto this -
JE: And then the story emerges and you get sort of like the bare bones of the story much more clearly. And I think that's what we're getting closer to now.
SD: But it is also true that you don't have to - oh, God what it is? It will take whatever you throw at it. We've been on stage and been really depressed and angry - and you try playing this play when you're depressed and angry - but something works. And audiences have been extraordinary, the audiences still in London at least, the reactions in the end have been the exactly same as when it was joyful and happy. So he's telling some kind of truth there.
JE: And he's so brilliant. I mean, there are sort of these silent detonations in the play which I still sort of discover them about within the relationship. But also what makes up, well, Annie, my character, is her inarticulate-ness (she kind of motions with her hands, like she's trying to get out some more words, then she pauses and puts her hand up in the air) Well...
(She starts laughing. Everyone else starts laughing.)
Why of course, there's my audition right there.
CR (laughing): You got inarticulateness, didn't you?
JE (still laughing): Yeah, I did.
CR (laughing): Go ahead.
JE (still laughing): Well, I completely destroyed - I completely shot myself in the foot.
CR: Oh, try!
JE (laughing): Because, no, no...what I was going to say was I've never had to play it, 'cause it's in the lines, but obviously I just did. I don't have to play it anyway.
CR: In a minute, we're going to see Tom Stoppard talking about The Real Thing [they never actually showed the clip]. Is it any different for you, in terms of these lines, than when you did Anna Karenina?
SD: Oh, yes. The TV?
CR: Yeah. Oh, you mean because the lines were cut down?
SD: Well, Anna Karenina wasn't written to be spoken, in any way. I mean, it was adapted. Film is different.
CR: What about Vanya?
SD: I'd like to do Vanya again, knowing now what I've discovered about doing this. Because I do think that there is something, that I think there's been some discoveries that have gone on. And I'd like to take in that discover language of Chekhov. But Chekhov is translated, you're doing somebody else's version of Chekhov, you know.
CR: The translation?
SD: Yeah. But more to the point, take it back to Shakespeare.
CR: More to the point, what would you take, what did you learn?
SD: What's the point? Oh, god, I'm trying to articulate it in so many different ways, but it's something to do with the difference between regarding your emotional impulse as dominant, and the language being the result of the emotional impulse. And somehow shifting the balance somehow to go, well maybe the language determines the emotional - well, it wouldn't be an impulse anymore - but the emotions respond to the language more. It's something in that kind of area.
JE: That's what Mamet says in True and False. That's why I asked you if you've read it.
CR: True and False? Is this Mamet on acting?
JE: Yes. And I've just started reading it. He says that language comes first, that an emotional impulse - an actor playing an emotional impulse - is actually very tedious. Because the audience can...well, if it's just that, because you can't always - and I find I get frustrated watching acting and the actors are emoting or acting. And you just want to hear what they're saying, because if they have a good line, they'll tell you what they're feeling, rather than this just sort of a generalized sort of rush of emotion that can sometimes happen.
SD: But the question is how you get there.
JE: You end up speaking up and out.
SD: I thought that's what we were doing at first.
JE: Yes, it's a long journey. And I don't think I'd ever be as close to it as I am now, and I'm no where near you. But if I hadn't been doing this for a year...
SD: Have you had Peter Hall on this?
CR: Yes.
SD: Well, has he talked about perhaps how to do Shakespeare?
CR: Yes.
SD: Well, it's the same kind of conversation.
CR: He was great, actually. It was wonderful the way he kind of...well, go ahead.
SD: It's the same kind of conversation. He would say that you must speak the words and get the rhythm and you will then be informed by that how you are supposed to be, rather than take a general situation, which is Hamlet is this with his father, how am I with my father, oh well, I'll make the words help me to react to that.
JE: It's paralyzing to do that.
CR: Finish this point, I want to hear what you have to say.
SD: Well, the point is, in the end, the two things have to meet. You do have to say the lines with the rhythm and there is a kind of truth inherent in that. But you also, in order to make an audience listen to you, have to be believable as a person I think. And that information isn't necessarily always given to you. So in a way we're talking about methodology, we're talking about how to get to the same point. I'm sure that - I don't know who Peter Hall's ideal actor would be, let's say John Gieguld - at his best, he would be doing more or less what anybody in this generation would be doing at their best. But we've got our different ways of getting to it now. And it's partly to do with these small spaces that we now work in, partly to do with television, partly to do with film, and the fact that an audience can see the whites of your eyes while the work is in process. And you must be believable somehow, and in a sense their priority is that you be believable at every second, not that you are necessarily holding the play up at every second. And I think early on in this process we were dropping Tom Stoppard's play in the interest of being believable to ourselves onstage. We would believe that we were two people on stage who loved each other. And a lot of the lines would get dropped away a lot of the time. And I think, we were -
JE: We were sort of acting alongside them.
SD: That's a very good way of putting that.
JE: But luckily the audience was still hearing lines. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.
CR: Sometimes they would.
JE (laughing): Yes.
CR: That's because you're a writer, and you were only a journalist before.
JE: I've been receiving them when they could hear me.
CR: How did you get to be, how did you get this opportunity? How long have you been acting?
JE: Oh, I left drama school 9 years ago.
CR: Yeah, and been in acting since then? Since you left drama school?
JE: Yes, I left early actually, to work with Peter Hall.
CR: Did you?
JE: Yeah.
CR: Where did you go to drama school?
JE: Central School of Speech and Drama. I went to North Carolina School of the Arts for one year, then I went to Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
CR: You went over there simply because you wanted to study over there?
JE: I wanted a classical training and I - uh, I don't know why really. I nearly went to Julliard, and I think I wanted a smaller pond. I was scared of America.
CR: It's a rich pond.
JE: Yeah. It's a very rich pond. It's taken until now - I've been offered jobs in New York before, and this is the first time I've felt ready to come back.
CR: If you need no other reason to go see this, they just gave it to you. The Real Thing, Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.