It often seems that both Pallas Athene and Aphrodite preside, at opposite sides of the stage, over certain plays by Tom Stoppard: that the leading characters of The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), are pulled in opposing directions by intellect and passion. Left brain versus right.
Stoppard can make this dualism witty or moving, and in both The Real Thing and The Invention of Love he takes it close to the brink of tragedy. Finally in these plays, as in Arcadia and in Shakespeare in Love, he resolves these divided loyalties by showing us - by showing his characters, rather - that sexual passion is in fact just another form of brainwork. Carnal knowledge! How Stoppard loves that phrase; and loves the old expression whereby sexual union used to be expressed as "knowing" someone (in the biblical sense). The heart and the head can work together after all. Love is one form of epistemology.
Some people have said lately that it is only in recent years - since Arcadia (1993) and, blazingly, in Shakespeare in Love -that Stoppard has started to show his heart: wear it, indeed, on his sleeve. Certainly there is a certain heartlessness about such brilliant earlier plays as Travesties. But the Donmar Warehouse's enthralling revival of The Real Thing (1982) reminds us all that Stoppard has shown the world his heart before.
In The Real Thing - surely his most nearly autobiographical work to date - the playwright Henry is both a witty maker of well-made plays and a twice-married man who adores being in love and who learns, late in the day, to suffer the torments of sexual jealousy.
But The Real Thing is about many things. It is about plays within a play. It is about plays as works of both writerly craft and personal statement. It is about multiple connections between life and art. And about connections between art and art: about taste, originality, reinvention. It is Private Lives as written for grown-ups about grown-ups by a grown-up. (And it is incidentally related to such other English studies of marriage and adultery and sexual jealousy as Pinter's Betrayal and Marber's Closer.) It is both exceptionally witty and exceptionally heartfelt, but also so fast it seldom allows one a chance either to laugh out loud or to feel any undivided emotion.
David Leveaux directs. The only quibbles I have are pedantic - to do with too-modern telephones and the fact that Anna Moffo's recording of "Sempre libera" does not belong in the Toscanini recording of Traviata. Maybe Jennifer Ehle looks too young to joke that 22-ish Billy might be her son; but one forgives a lot in the face of Ehle's personal beauty, which is now in its prime. Every iota of body-language, above all facial language, between Annie (the role she plays) and Henry (the man she marries) is riveting: sometimes it is a thrill just to watch them facing each other motionless across an empty room. And Ehle's speaking, though less mature, is equally true in feeling. Sarah Woodward, as Henry's first wife Charlotte, perfectly handles the role's tough and canny wit. Nigel Lindsay as Annie's first husband Max and Mark Bazeley as her young admirer Billy are both first-rate.
Each time I see Stephen Dillane, who here plays Henry, I see more clearly what a great actor he is. His playing is so economical and his style so devoid of vocal or physical glamour that, at first, you hardly notice him himself: only what he is doing. He dissolves himself into the character and the play, and everything he does is converted into expression: the lift of an eyebrow, the shading of a syllable. In The Real Thing, he carries with effortless spontaneity the many-faceted core of Stoppard's many-layered play, and delivers with marvellously natural eloquence the speeches about good plays and bad (compared to cricket-bats), about the insularity of passion, and about acknowledging the attractions of other people. Thanks to him, and thanks to Stoppard, one travels a large journey of heart and mind in this production. It goes without saying that if it transfers to the West End, then London would be a better place.
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