April 18, 2000
By Linda Winer
Seen at Friday's preview.
The successful playwright in Tom Stoppard's The Real
Thing
insists that "loving and being loved" are "unliterary"
conditions-"happiness
expressed in banality and lust." That this theory is being
declared at the
precise time Stoppard is defying it, of course, is just one
daredevil
profundity in one of the most gloriously articulate, least
banal love stories
that modern theater knows enough to cherish.
At the end of the first major revival of his 1982 work, which opened at the Barrymore Theatre last night in David Leveaux' burning yet cool London production, we find ourselves fantasizing that Stoppard wrote his most personal and accessible play to counter tiresome accusations of brainy gimmickry: "You want boulevard comedy?" we imagine him snarling. "You want aching heart? Well, watch this one." Without breaking a sweat, he turned around and gave the world a romantic serio-comedy that uses a dizzying Chinese box of literary devices to express devastating compassion for the most basic of elusive human emotions.
The result, then and now, plays with reality and illusion with the unlikely grace of Noel Coward partying for keeps with Pirandello. The play-which Mike Nichols memorably directed on Broadway in 1984 with Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Christine Baranski, Peter Gallagher and a teen named Cynthia Nixon-remains a dazzling dissection of adultery, the theater, radical politics and other so-called real things. Where that version had a more lush American realism than the flintier British original with Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal, this new import has a strangely touching trust in our ability to be reached in deep places without stars to guide us to the box office.
The trust should pay off. Leveaux, who directed Broadway's flammable Natasha Richardson-Liam Neeson Anna Christie and the carnivorous Zoe Caldwell Electra, has a lean, clean, eerily transparent way with the most unruly feelings of lust, loyalty, love and independence. His expert actors-assembled at the same Donmar Warehouse that has sent us Cabaret, The Blue Room, Electra, True West and Sam Mendes -play ambivalence and passion with a self-effacing vibrancy that makes us lean into the action so as not to miss a nuance.
Stephen Dillane plays playwright Henry, whose debonair view of adultery is Stoppard's opening scene. Henry cheats on his own actress wife, Charlotte (Sarah Woodward), with Annie (Jennifer Ehle), the wife of his own play's actor.
By the time he must face the way he feels when new wife Annie may be cheating on him, Henry's intellectual contempt for the banalities of love and celebration of the power of words have been shredded into an unforgettable primal cry of helpless obsession.
Is this raging possessiveness the real thing? Or, more likely, does the real thing include what Annie says about Henry needing "to find the part of yourself where I am not important or you won't be worth loving?" But dear, paradoxical Henry is an intellectual writer who perceives his own reality through the lyrics and rhythms of the sort of pop music that "it's not OK" for trendy people to worship-think Neil Sedaka and Herman's Hermits.
Obviously, there is a simple dishrag of a soul somewhere deep inside all the high-flown and equally touching rhapsodies about the importance of words.
Henry has contempt for the cliched writings of a political prisoner whom Annie has adopted, and insists-we trust with the voice of Stoppard himself-that "Words are sacred...If you get the words in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."
Dillane is a master of emotional underplaying as Henry, whose transformations are more believable than when the showier Irons had them about Close's wrongheadedly earthbound Annie. Ehle, in contrast, crinkles with the complexities of happiness and self-reliance. Sarah Woodward is all shrewd cookie, and its opposite, as Henry's first wife.
Nigel Lindsay is both pathetic and honest as Annie's first husband. When he and Annie awkwardly hug one another's heads in the loving brutality of their breakup, we know Leveaux understands how banality can hurt. Vickie Mortimer's sets go back to the sliding panels and industrial chic of the original London production, when we were not quite so used to playwrights using pop songs as metaphors during scene changes.
The production is the first Broadway venture of Miramax, producers of Stoppard's Shakespeare in Love, and there are rumors of Gwyneth Paltrow or Julianne Moore taking over when the London cast ends its 20-week run. Really.
Back to The Real Thing Article Index