April 20, 2000
by Clifford A. Ridley
NEW YORK - What a cracklingly good play is The Real Thing, and what a cracklingly good production David Leveaux has made of it!
Tom Stoppard's 1982 exploration of love, of what happens when the abstraction meets the mixed-up genuine article, is dazzlingly witty, quietly moving and penetratingly sage. And Leveaux's staging at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, imported from London with its cast intact, perfectly captures both the play's brittle humor and its profoundly human ardor and attendant confusion.
Stephen Dillane is Henry, the facile playwright who leaves his wife for Annie, an actress whose eventual fling with a young costar, Billy, precipitates the play's central argument. Annie (Jennifer Ehle) loves Henry, but his insistence that love be as neat as his plays ("happiness is equilibrium") drives her mad.
Henry is in love with love, with the all-consuming nature of it, "the insularity of passion." But to Annie, that's too simple, too suffocating. "You have to find a part of yourself where I'm not important," she says, yet Henry can't do it.
And so the lines are drawn, and though the conclusion may be deliberately ambiguous, getting there is an invigorating journey, including an eloquent defense of writerly precision and a meltingly tender scene between Henry and his teenage daughter. Dillane and Ehle are at once vibrantly alive and achingly vulnerable; and there are masterly supporting performances by Sarah Woodward, Nigel Lindsay, Charlotte Parry and Oscar Pearce.
Leveaux's direction deftly balances the play's dual appeals to the heart and the mind; and Vicki Mortimer's set design, involving a series of gray, industrial-looking panels that rearrange themselves from scene to scene, creates a clean, efficient environment that contains the play without visual comment. A few scene changes seemed awkward at the preview I saw, a minor blemish on an otherwise flawless evening.
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