by Michael Kuchwara, AP Drama Critic
NEW YORK (AP) - As Cole Porter once wrote, ``What is this thing called love?''
It is a question that keeps coming back again and again to haunt the discombobulated characters in The Real Thing Tom Stoppard's generous meditation on fidelity and faithlessness that remains as potent today as when the play first opened on Broadway in 1984.
In fact, the current revival, which arrived Monday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, seems even more vibrant, particularly under David Leveaux's careful, cinematic but not fussy direction.
Stephen Dillane and the rest of a fine British cast from London's Donmar Warehouse mine Stoppard's brilliant wordplay with such intensity that The Real Thing feels freshly minted, spontaneous and not at all dated, as do so many dramas from the not-so-distant past.
Dillane portrays a romantically challenged English playwright named Henry, a sardonic intellectual, too smart for his own good and a man who uses his intelligence to keep women at bay. It prevents him from making a commitment, not only, as the play opens, to his actress-wife, Charlotte, but to his lover, Annie.
Annie, in turn, is cheating on husband Max, who is appearing with Charlotte in Henry's new comedy about adultery, House of Cards. Life and art get thoroughly mixed up - and more than a bit messy - in Stoppard's world of London artists.
When Henry and Annie finally settle down together, strains begin to show. Annie becomes enamored of a young actor, forcing Henry to rethink what his relationship to her really means. Love, he learns, is more than lust and the banalities uttered in the beloved pop songs of his youth.
It also makes him reexamine his life as a playwright, particularly when he has to learn how to come to terms with Annie's most persistent charity case - a loutish leftist, who happens to be a terrible writer. And that, according to Henry, is the worst sin of all.
Henry, originally played on Broadway by Jeremy Irons, is a marathon role. Dillane, a wiry guy with an ingratiating stage presence, goes the course without tiring. He's funny and charming, but he gets the pain behind the writer's glibness and cutting retorts, too. By the end of the play, Henry has grown, and so has Dillane's remarkable performance.
Jennifer Ehle has less to work with as the socially committed Annie, yet she projects a passion that is not always suggested by the script. Sarah Woodward brings a tart, acerbic quality to the role of Henry's first wife, while Nigel Lindsay, as Max, perfectly captures a wronged mate's overwhelming self-pity.
Even the smallest roles make impressions, particularly Oscar Pearce's flirtatious young actor and Charlotte Parry's portrait of Henry's practical and sexually precocious daughter.
The production design is spare, almost bare bones, with a few tables, chairs and a record player suggesting Henry's living room. Yet the feeling of this revival is anything but minimal. Leveaux, who worked wonders with his Broadway reexaminations of Anna Christie and Electra, has done it again here. The Real Thing rates as real, adult entertainment, wise, witty and full of compassion for the foibles of the human heart.
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