Theater Notes

February 6, 2000

By Benedict Nightingale

Jennifer Ehle and Stephen Dillane in The Real Thing in London
photo by Alastair Muir

A revival of Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing, much admired when it opened in the tiny Donmar Warehouse last year, is making a stopover at the Albery before leaving for Broadway in April. ...[some stuff about other plays] The Real Thing first hit Broadway in 1984, when Jeremy Irons played the dramatist who mislaid his poise and urbanity when he was sexually betrayed by Glenn Close as the actress he married after himself betraying his first wife. Thanks to his willowy angst and her vitality, the play definitively answered a long-heard complaint about Tom Stoppard, which was that his characters lacked much capacity for personal emotion. The feelings are less upfront, more inner in David Leveaux's revival; but you don't doubt the seriousness of the love and pain linking and threatening the new pairing, Stephen Dillane's dry, droll Henry and Jennifer Ehle's creamy, dreamy Annie.

Not that Sir Tom's trademark wit and intellectual curiousity are missing: far from it. Explicitly, implicitly, his characters are always inviting you to look at passion and commitment from different angles. Even the roles Annie is playing offstage, Strindberg's tormented Miss Julie and the incestuous sister in Ford's 'Tis a Pity She's A Whore, become ingredients in a running debate about whether "the real thing" exists. And when Mr. Dillane's Henry is answering his feminist daughter, who thinks any permanent bond between men and women is "colonization", by insisting that love is "mess, tears, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness" - well, he has the doleful charisma to convince you that, yes, it does.

February 27, 2000

The Real Thing - Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close were great in 1984 in Tom Stoppard's story of a playwright and his second wife, an actress for whom he left his first wife. Now Stephen Dillane (known to independent film fans from Henry Jaglom's D�j� Vu) and Jennifer Ehle (Oscar Wilde's wife in the film Wilde) have their turn. Directed by David Leveaux. Barrymore Theater. Previews begin March 29. Opens April 17.

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