by Robert Butler
One of the hardest tricks in theatre is to get actors to hold each other close, kiss and caress without the audience squirming in their seats at the clunkiness of it all. Very few directors can pull this off. David Leveaux is one.
Nine years ago, he directed a production of Therese Raquin with Joanne Pearce as Therese and Neil Pearson as Laurent, which was so steamy the stage managers referred to it as "When Terry and Larry Get Laid". With his revival of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play, The Real Thing, Leveaux reasserts his claim to be the theatre's leading director of nookie. Seeing this production at the Donmar, it's impossible not to think what he might have achieved with Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room. Leveaux has cast this revival very cleverly with two enormously attractive actors in leads. As Henry, the wispy, pedagogic playwright, Stephen Dillane is perfect because he can act intelligence naturally. He convinces us that there's no line that Stoppard could come up with that mightn't have occurred to him on his own. His eyes dart, his eyebrows arch, his fingers tug at his ear lobes. This underlying alertness provides the springboard for the early badinage. He also knows quickness doesn't mean speed and leaves a wonderful yawning gap before responding with the funniest line of the evening. His restlessness gradually metamorphoses into something injured, reflective and profound.
This review can hardly do justice to Jennifer Ehle's physical appeal. Someone will need to write her a sonnet. But her luminous performance is fascinating for the way it walks a tightrope between smiles and tears without turning cute. As Annie, the actress moving between husbands, Ehle is eloquent and forceful. Even in her extreme emotional moments, she never loses her resonance.
Looking back now over Stoppard's career from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966 to this year's Shakespeare in Love, we can see Stoppard's recurring interest in shifting theatrical boundaries: he loves to play with plays within plays. And it's central to this remarkably funny and honest play. Seventeen years on, it looks in tremendous shape. If anything it hasn't dated: Henry's preference for the Everly Brothers over Pink Floyd, has proved to be retro ahead of its time.
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