`Real Thing': He's So Clever, So Glib ... So Vulnerable

April 18, 2000

By Ben Brantley

Jennifer Ehle, standing, with, from left, Nigel Lindsay, Sarah Woodward and Stephen Dillane in The Real Thing, at the Barrymore
photo by Sara Krulwich

Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle in Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing
photo by Sara Krulwich

Now here is a man you would surely love to have at your table at one of those insufferably self-important dinner parties. He speaks in sentences that might have been cut by a jeweler; he banishes conversational clich�s by merely cocking an eyebrow, and he has somehow turned undergraduate self-consciousness into a highly evolved form of charm.

What's more, when he describes himself as a romantic, you believe him, just as you believe that he suffers for it. That makes him easier to take when he seems a little, well, superior. There is much to be said for the aesthetic value of shadow in a bright presence.

Such are the attributes of Henry, the playwright who wrote that West End hit House of Cards, or at least Henry as he is represented by Stephen Dillane, the immensely appealing center of the immensely appealing revival of Tom Stoppard's Real Thing, which opened last night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.

Under the accomplished direction of David Leveaux, who brought a very different kind of finesse to last season's Electra, this is a production that should lure those New Yorkers who say they rarely go to the theater because it's too juvenile or too vulgar or too ponderous, usually opting instead for yet another dinner party.

And with the delectable Jennifer Ehle playing self-confident body to Mr. Dilane's self-questioning mind, the show has a sensual sparkle that was less evident in the fine Tony-winning New York incarnation of 1984 with Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close.

The Real Thing -- an import from the Donmar Warehouse, the current epicenter of theatrical glamour in London (Cabaret, The Blue Room) -- is a rare thing even in what has been an exceptionally strong season for straight plays on Broadway: an elegant comedy of infidelity filled with the sort of comebacks that people only wish they were capable of themselves.

True, this 1982 play from the author of Jumpers and Arcadia is also always subverting itself, pointing out how some things, love among them, defy glib articulation. But, ah, how articulately it manages to say so. If its structural game-playing seems a tad too clever this time around and its second act weaker than its first, the fact remains that few comedies have ever managed to have it so successfully both ways.

When The Real Thing first opened, it was greeted with the kind of exclamations that heralded Garbo's debut in talking pictures. "Stoppard feels!" was the delighted implication of most of the reviews, a sense that the most dizzyingly cerebral of British playwrights had at last led with his heart instead of his head.

What gave the play an extra savory twist was the fact that it was about a dizzyingly cerebral playwright who confesses at one point that he just doesn't know how to "write love." The title itself seemed a charming admission of the same defeat, using the sort of nonspecific noun that was anathema to its main character. Which isn't to say that Mr. Stoppard had forsaken his playful intellectualism or sure hand for form.

The Real Thing begins with a sort of literary trompe l'oeil: a scene in which a husband confronts his wife with her presumed infidelity. This turns out to be a scene in a London play by Henry, performed by Charlotte (Sarah Woodward), an actress who is Henry's wife in real life, and Max (Nigel Lindsay), who is married to another actress, Annie (Ms. Ehle), with whom Henry is having an affair.

The scene becomes a reference point for the rest of the evening, as two real-life marriages shatter, echoing and diverging from the play within the play. Other touchstones are provided by dialogue from such classic plays of passion as Miss Julie and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. And Henry, determined to conquer love on the page, comes down with writer's block.

Although Charlotte early on observes that the difference between dialogue onstage and in life is that life demands "thinking time" between epigrams, the characters are still remarkably quick on the uptake: Henry, especially, of course, but so are Charlotte and Henry's teenage daughter, Debbie (Charlotte Parry), and Charlotte herself.

It is a testament to the arbitrariness of love that Henry and Charlotte seem to be more naturally matched than Henry and Annie, who while obviously intelligent is less deft with the mot juste. She is also unswervingly headstrong and gets involved politically with an imprisoned Scottish soldier (Joshua Henderson) and sexually with a younger actor (Oscar Pearce). The distress these events cause Henry lead him to lively disquisitions on the virtues and limitations of language, including an unforgettable speech with a cricket bat as a visual aid.

Mr. Dillane's Henry delivers this moment pricelessly to Ms. Ehle's Annie. As he tries to explain why a leaden script written by Annie's incarcerated soldier is no good, you can see him getting high on the combined delights of his sporting metaphor, his love of language and his love of the woman to whom he is speaking.

Mr. Dillane, whose high and exposed forehead suggests both a temple of thought and an irresistible target, is never less than captivating. Even his brightly colored socks (the perfectly detailed costumes are by Vicki Mortimer, who also designed the sets) inspire affection.

There's nary a trace of the snide superiority and remoteness that Jeremy Irons brought to his equally inspired but very different interpretation of the role, and it could be argued that his Henry is a tad too likable. It's hard to understand why he makes people so angry, and the character almost becomes a holy martyr to the causes of pure language and pure love.

Fortunately, there is another side to be heard from, and it is ably embodied by Ms. Ehle. This rising star, best known as Elizabeth in the recent television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, wears her character's sensuality, and her awareness of its effect on others, without coyness or irony. There is no smugness about her either (and there was, a bit, in Ms. Close's portrayal), but there is a remarkable self-possession, especially evident in the smile with which she covers discomfort. This Annie easily holds her own against the older Henry and his artillery of words.

All the actors are good, however, especially the women, to whose characters Mr. Stoppard has tellingly devoted the greatest care. As Henry's wife (soon to be ex-) and daughter, Ms. Woodward and Ms. Parry incisively present figures who have both been shaped by Henry and somehow gotten beyond him, like Eliza Dolittle with Henry Higgins.

Mr. Leaveaux's staging adroitly balances the boulevard comedy with an emotional gravity, an awareness that people are being seriously wounded here. The badinage feels natural precisely because directors and actors are so attentive to what bodies say that words don't.

Watch, for example, Ms. Ehle's postures when Annie breaks off with Max (something to which Mr. Lindsay responds harrowingly); when she keeps trying to touch Henry during an argument and when she kisses Mr. Pearce's young actor in a way that unquestionably confirms her dominance in that relationship.

This balancing of the cerebral and the emotional is almost perfectly realized in the first act. In the longer second act you become conscious of a script annotating itself, and the way the play scores off Mr. Pearce's character, the dubious object of Annie's political engagement, still feels entirely too easy. One other caveat: Ms. Mortimer's sets seem out of scale at the Barrymore, and when the performers climb that long upstage staircase, it's like a challenge out of Pilgrim's Progress.

These are minor objections, however, about a production that so expertly fills a vacuum on Broadway: the urbane comedy. The Real Thing, of course, is something more than that as well.

Throughout the evening, vintage pop songs are played, numbers like Do Wah Diddy Diddy and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? It's a running joke that this is the only kind of music to which Henry responds. But the play takes the emotional pull of such music, and the varied feelings it addresses, seriously.

As I was leaving The Real Thing, I noticed a middle-aged member of the audience singing the Monkees hit I'm a Believer, a recording of which ends the production. It's an upbeat song, but the man looked puzzled and just a bit melancholy. Mr. Stoppard, one imagines, would have been pleased by the response.

The Real Thing

By Tom Stoppard; directed by David Leveaux; sets and costumes by Vicki Mortimer; lighting by Mark Henderson and David Weiner; sound by John A. Leonard, for Aura Sound Design Ltd.; production stage manager, Bonnie L. Becker; associate set designer, Nancy Thun; associate costume designer, Irene Bohan; technical supervisor, Peter Fulbright; general management, 101 Productions; associate producers, Act Productions/Randall L. Wreghitt. The Donmar Warehouse production presented by Anita Waxman, Elizabeth Williams, Ron Kastner and Miramax Films. At the Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, Manhattan.

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