reviews by Michael Coveney
The Real Thing (Donmar Warehouse)
verdict: Cool Stoppard revival of passion, pop and adultery, 4 stars
The test of a good play might be that it is still preformed in 50 years' time. Two plays this week, one from 1982 (by Tom Stoppard), one from 1962 (by David Turner), are candidates for posterity.
And each confirms what a fine time for revivals we are enjoying. Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle do the business for Stoppard at the Donmar. Dillane plays Henry, a playwright afflicted by detachment, obsessed with pop music and convinced that writers aren't sacred but words are. Yes, a little like Sir Tom himself, you think, except that Mr Dillane looks like a scruffy version of Martin Amis, only taller. And the delectable Miss Ehle - glistening and slippery like her name - plays Annie, the married actress Henry steals from the actor first seen appearing in his own play about jealousy and adultery. First time round, the play felt like a personal statement of what matters in art and relationships. It still does.
The speech in which Henry declares that a cricket bat is sprung like a dance floor and designed to dispatch balls a long way with minimal effort - 'What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats' - is as close to a Stoppardian credo as we will hear in the theatre. Cleverly, it serves the purpose of rebutting the artistic validity of a criminal lout with language whose Left-wing cause Annie has espoused. With a beautiful irony, Henry becomes enslaved by his own emotions and ends up rewriting the criminal's lousy television play. David Leveaux's production is cool, clean and clinical on a lovely design of sheet metal panels by Vicki Mortimer. And there is super support from Nigel Lindsay and Sarah Woodward.
Almost every line is to be relished, even the throaways such as the one about the daughter who ate like a horse until she had one.
This is also the play where even the black-out music has dramatic value, and popular culture takes its revenge on high art in suggesting Procul Harum actually improved on Bach's Air On A G String.
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