This is the third production in a row from the Donmar which I cannot recommend too highly - it is getting to be a habit and a very pleasurable one. Here we have the deserved darling of the script writing Oscars, Tom Stoppard, author of this play, first performed in 1982. His wit zaps us with laughter like a submachine gun delivering one liners. It is a brilliantly funny play. Stephen Dillane, surely one of our most accomplished actors, plays a playwright, Henry. His opening dilemma is to find eight pieces of music for his impending recording of Desert Island Discs. Given his own choice, he would be taking Herman's Hermits, The Monkees, the Righteous Brothers and other icons of sixties pop culture.
However, he feels the pressure to select something more intellectually acceptable and is searching through the collection of LPs, Vinyls to you, looking for a piece of music he heard from a hotel room in Bournemouth or was it Zermatt? As unsophisticated as is his musical taste, so his gift for repartee is honed to perfection. In one other area is he an innocent, he is unashamedly romantic, a man who loves without jealousy or fear of betrayal.
We follow this man through two marriages, both to actresses. The first is to Charlotte, Sarah Woodward, a sardonic and slightly sour character. The second is to Annie, Jennifer Ehle, an altogether sweeter prospect, and played by this most attractive of actors. Annie starts the play married to Max, Nigel Lindsay, who takes his wife's adultery very, very badly indeed. Like Othello, it is the handkerchief which gives her away. Max's swing from anger to despair to pleading, contrasts with the phlegmatic Henry, who seems to take all of life's shattering events in his stride. This is an Eighties play featuring the middle class, there is no physical violence here, but relationships which go wrong among the "civilised". The minimalist set from Vicki Mortimer is perfect as a backdrop, designer linen and muslin are sported and the lighting, by Mark Henderson forms grids in shade and light to complete a superficially ideal world. David Leveaux directs deftly.
It is the second half of the play which delves deep into the relationship quagmire, when infidelity, lies and suspicion seem to take hold. Annie is involved with the campaign to free Brodie, a squaddie who has been imprisoned for setting fire to a Cenotaph wreath. Ehle is perfect as the nicely brought up girl, getting a sexual frisson from associating with working class men, with prison and injustice to add to the fascinating mix.
The point is underlined when Henry's daughter, Debbie, Caroline Hayes, takes off with a fairground worker. Remember when they used to talk about "real people"? It is a play about love and sex, but also about writing, as Stoppard seems to draw on his own experience of both. Talking about the art of the writer, Henry says, "Words, when you look after them can build bridges across incomprehension and class". He makes us ask whether the real thing is the experience of life in the raw or skilled writing about other people's experiences. The pivot for this debate is Brodie's own autobiographical, but badly written play. Similarly, is love real or illusory? Which is the real thing, lust or tolerance? It is a very clever play and one which will make you laugh again and again. There are scenes which are pure trompe l'oeil, with a clever twist and others which seem to follow an anarchic trail. As Annie tries to educate Henry in classical music, testing him as to what a piece of opera is.
Annie "No, it can't be Strauss, it's in Italian."
Henry "Ah then, Verdi!"
Annie "Which one?"
Henry "Giuseppe", he says, inspired!
Henry explains his philosophy of love and sex as knowledge, a private knowledge of each other as lovers, which is separated from our public lives. At the beginning of the play, Henry is almost untouched by emotion and although he is a romantic, he doesn't suffer, his experiences skate over the surface of his feelings. By the end of the play he has changed and felt pain.
Dillane and Ehle act each other off the stage, Dillane's wonderful timing and expression, Ehle's sincerity and sex appeal. I still feel that I need to read the play or see it again in order to understand it more fully. I think I'll need to book it very quickly because everyone will want to see it, after all this IS THE REAL THING!
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