Compelling - Jennifer Ehle in Tom Stoppard's
The Real Thing
photo by Alastair Muir
Art and illusion, honesty and deception, true feeling and the defences we put up against it - Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing is a many-sided work, testing and testing the idea of reality in all manner of ways. But there can be no doubt where its central thrust lies.
Henry, the hero, is a playwright. He writes about love, but his most obvious characteristics are wit, cleverness, detachment, the desire to remain in control. Then he embarks on an affair with an actress called Annie, the wife of the leading man in his latest success, House of Cards. He marries her (after breaking up with his own wife) and proceeds to learn that love - the real thing - can be messy, painful and unpredictable, that it leaves you exposed.
First staged in 1982, and now triumphantly revived at the Donmar Warehouse, the play is (to my mind, at least) Stoppard's most satisfying. It has greater emotional depth than his earlier work, but what is equally impressive is that it doesn't propose any easy trading in of head for heart.
It is engenious and paradoxical - not the least of its paradoxes being that all the main characters involved in its vindication of "reality" inhabit the highly artificial world of the theatre. (Henry's first wife is an actress too.) And it is full of tricks ]which, whatever their deeper import, we can also enjoy for their own sakes, as we might enjoy a particularly neat conundrum or optical illustion.
We start off, for instance, with a scene about infidelity that we naturally take at face value. Instead, it turns out to be a scene from House of Cards. Ah, a contrast between brittle contrivance and "the real thing"! Yet in retrospect, ironically, it doesn't seem all that different from what follows.
The "real" play is almost equally marked by frisky jokes and adroit shifts of perspective; and though Henry may sometimes be struck dumb by love, or reduced to abject pleading, he isn't inarticulate for long. We wouldn't believe in him if he was; since he is often very funny, we wouldn't want him to be.
Still, there is a difference between the play within a play and the play itself, and it is a decisive one. We believe in the love story, we enter into it. Stoppard's great achievement is to make us feel the pain and confusion - and the excitement.
The Donmar production, directed by David Leveaux, features a superlative performance from Stephen Dillane as Henry (his career best, as sports commentators say), a compelling Annie from Jennifer Ehle, and admireable support from Sarah Woodward and Nigel Lindsay as their discarded partners.
The one doubt we are left with is whether Annie isn't idealised, whether she wouldn't have been a good deal more infuriating in real life - but then we mustn't look for complete reality in the theatre, not even in The Real Thing.
Back to The Real Thing Article Index