April 23, 2000
By Clive Barnes
As Broadway gears up for its customary, who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire fiesta known as the Tony Awards, the big question is whether a show is better the second time around.There are currently three second-timers on New York
stages. Two are from Britain - Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar. The Yankee entrant is Arthur Miller's "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan.
And the final answer? Two are hits and one is a mile-wide miss. Guess which is what?
Stoppard's 1982 drama is the real thing, marking the first time that England's brainiest playwright stepped out from the witty, intellectual shadows to show life as it's lived in all its steam and consequences.
But the new production of The Real Thing, with its original cast intact from last year's staging at London's Donmar Warehouse, offers something more as well: a superb lead performance by Stephen Dillane that gives us insight to the real Stoppard.
Wry and painfully charming, Dillane (give that man his Tony right now!) embues the beleaguered dramatist Henry with seemingly everything we've read about Stoppard himself.
He brings utter conviction, for example, to his character's love of cricket - a passion that Stoppard shares with the likes of Harold Pinter. (For many British intellectuals the game is much like basketball is to Spike Lee.)
Dillane's convincing and natural performance also reminds us of a powerful irony, that Stoppard himself left his own wife for Felicity Kendal, the actress who was so marvelous as the tempting Annie in the original Real Thing in London.
But it is not only Dillane's performance that makes this The Real Thing so much better on Broadway the second time around.
Director David Leveaux, unlike his predecessors Peter Wood (1982) in London and Mike Nichols on Broadway (1984), brings a rueful brilliance to its theater box of plays within plays, of art within life and life within art.
And he gives the play's roaring comedy a hollow after-laugh of truth.
And while Dillane's Henry III is superior to the flamboyant version from Jeremy Irons (not to mention the more harried Roger Rees in London), his Cressida-like heroine is here played by the succulently sensual Jennifer Ehle, a sumptuous far cry from the sexless Glenn Close.
The whole cast, including Sarah Woodward and Nigel Lindsay, is for a playwright to die for. If you have only one show to see in New York make it real and make it The Real Thing.
Back to The Real Thing Article Index