Charles Spencer reviews The Real Thing at Donmar Warehouse
Tom Stoppard is sometimes accused of being an excessively cerebral dramatist, but in fact he writes extraordinarily well about the human heart.
He proved it most recently with Shakespeare in Love, that glowingly romantic Oscar-winning comedy, while his last stage play, The Invention of Love, beautifully and painfully caught A E Housman's unrequited passion for his friend Moses Jackson.
The conventional wisdom is that Stoppard's work has deepened as he has become older, but this welcome revival of The Real Thing (1982) proves that he was writing superbly about love almost 20 years ago.
The drama concerns a witty playwright's affair with an actress. In the original production the actress was played by Felicity Kendal, Stoppard's muse and, for a time, lover.
It is perhaps impertinent to speculate about how autobiographical the play is - Stoppard has conceded that it contains a degree of self-revelation. I can only say that The Real Thing comes over like, well, the real thing, beautifully capturing both the exhilaration and the agony of romantic love.
Deep feeling is accompanied by Stoppard's usual ingenuity and effervescent humour. The mood keeps switching between raw and comic, and Stoppard offers a passionate defence of the sanctitity of language and a vicious attack on illiterate Left-wing sloganeering masquerading as art.
To put the cherry on the cake, the show is also an affectionate tribute to Sixties pop, with scenes punctuated by apt and occasionally heroically naff greatest hits from the likes of the Righteous Brothers and Herman's Hermits.
The Real Thing opens with a characteristic Stoppardian coup, in which we watch a husband confront his wife with evidence of her adultery. The mood is clenched and angry; but this, it turns out, isn't the real thing at all, but a scene from the dramatist Henry's play.
In the next scene we meet Henry himself and his embittered wife, Charlotte (the excellent Sarah Woodward). The mood is clenched and angry again, but this time it is happening for real - except, of course, now we don't forget we are watching a play.
Such Pirandellian gamesmanship might become tiresome if it weren't for the comedy's warmth and wit. There is a remarkable passsage when Henry, complains that when he tries to write about love "it just comes out embarrassing". Yet as Henry's affair with the actress Annie develops, you catch both the heady excitement of romance, and the corrosive pain of sexual jealousy, with the help of remarkable performances from Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle.
There is a terrific sexual charge between these two in David Leveaux's absorbing production, with Henry's formidable articulacy coming into thrilling collision with Annie's more instinctive approach to life. Dillane delivers Stoppard's marvellously eloquent, unashamedly elitist speeches about life, art and language with virtuosic assurance, while Ehle offers a performance of warm humour, glowing sensuality and sudden rage that electrifies the house.
I'm less certain about the sub-plot involving Annie's support of a prisoner who has been jailed for violent political protest at the Cenotaph. It gives Stoppard a fine chance to lay into the lazy fatuities of agitprop, but the tone becomes patronising.
What's in no doubt is The Real Thing's vitality, and the touching optimism of its ending. When it comes to love, the piece joyously insists, Stoppard, like the Monkees, is a believer.
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