'Luminous, sensitve and deeply observed': Jennifer
Ehle with Stephen Dillane.
Photograph by Mark Ellidge
from the London Times, 6/6/99
by John Peter
Powerhouses do not come much smaller, nor much more powerful, than the Donmar Warehouse, and its latest production is right up to its highest and most impeccable standards.
Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing seems at first something of a teaser. A man is building a house of cards. For him, though, this is not a real thing but only a game, for it turns out that he is, by profession, an architect. Now the door bangs and the house of cards collapses, as if from a blast of reality: the architect's wife has arrived home from Switzerland, if that is where she had really been.
But in the next scene you realise that none of this is the real thing: what you have just seen was only a play within the play, called The House of Cards, and it is obviously about infidelity. In "real" life the woman who plays the wife (Sarah Woodward) is Charlotte, married to Henry, the author of the play (Stephen Dillane), and the man who plays the husband (Nigel Lindsay) is Max, Henry's best friend. In "real" life Max is married to another actress, Annie (Jennifer Ehle); and come Sunday the two theatrical couples relax tensely in Henry's house.
Few playwrights can equal Stoppard in dramatising the silent fissures within a marriage, or in marking out the inner no man's land where the intimate exasperations that come from habit change into the destructive impatience that comes from maladjustment. Here the tension is palpable but at first unclear. Who is watching whom and why? Who is pretending not to be watching whom and why? Soon the crosscurrents of attention become identifiable, and the explosion that follows is, like all such explosions, painful, embar-rassing, humiliating. Stoppard's own play, too, is, among other things, about infidelity.
Henry's problem is that he has a searching but self-absorbed intelligence. Everything interests him, but he garners knowledge, experience and ideas, bee-like, for later use. You sense that to be watched by Henry is to be examined and left naked: for him, the exciting thing is not what you are but what you signify. Until, that is, he finds Annie. Dillane plays him as a lean, spare, watchful animal, eyes glinting: an endangered species, both hunter and hunted. There is something in Dillane's body that warns you, "this far and no further", while his face and eyes plead to be taken as he is and to be known completely - or as completely as is compatible with his own safety. Charlotte lives in a clearer, simpler, less fearful world, one in which emotions, though troublesome, can be told to behave themselves. She knows that she married trouble; and Woodward gives a cool, self-denying account of a life uncrowded with inner incidents.
Ehle's performance is the most luminous, the most sensitive, the most intelligent and deeply observed of her career. She understands that Annie is the most mature of this quartet, and therefore has the most to lose. Her body moves, at first, as if repressing something and anxious that this should not be observed. It is an English woman's body, voluptuous but diffident, with a sense of dignity and apprehension. Later, in the air of freedom called love, this body relaxes, subtly, quietly, but joyously. This is acting of a very high order: the actress's technique is completely absorbed in a sense of warm, unostentatious life. It is clear from the start that, in any relationship with Henry, Annie will have to be the protector, the kindly one, the sustainer. Max, her husband, also lives in a simpler world, and Lindsay pinpoints precisely the troubled core of a man who is not nearly as resilient as he thinks.
The first two scenes are full of surprises, for both characters and audience. Stoppard is a master of the moment when a single phrase, its tip poisoned with wit, reverses a situation or causes a person's belief to collapse like a house of cards. But he is much more than a psychological showman, and his revelations, which should be the envy of the most sophisticated technicians of the theatre, are not mere fireworks. The coup de th��tre is also a moment of desolation and pain. Such moments are at the heart of Stoppard's play and they trap you in its central dilemmas. Is there anything you can believe in; anything rock solid, the real thing? In any case, what is more real: your own life, the life of these theatre professionals who are Stoppard's characters, or the life of the characters they create when they are working? The system of relativities called life enmeshes you in its net of dangers and possibilities. Do you love somebody because you are in love with them? Or is being in love the sum total of loving?
One of Stoppard's points is that art has the same imperatives, uncertainties and relativities. This is not because his central character is a writer: Stoppard is not in the post-Romantic business of writing about the dilemmas of an artist as representative Man. No, it is because he knows that experiencing art is as real as experiencing love, weather conditions or career problems. Writing plays and acting in them pays the mortgage, and involves your inner life in thrilling and invidious ways. Art, like love, is a question of quality, not just commitment. For example, Annie wants to help Brodie, a young Scotsman (Joshua Henderson) who was arrested for having set fire to a wreath at the Cenotaph, either as a political gesture or to impress her. Either way, he has written a dreadful, clich�-soaked play about a belligerent young Scotsman spouting slogans about oppression. Of course, Henry observes, Brodie can't write. But will his play be better if Henry touches it up a bit? It will not be the same play: but does that solve the question of commitment, quality and values? What are the values in writing, and who adjudicates? Do you write because you are a writer, or are you a writer because writing is what you do? Which is the real thing?
This is a big play, big with ideas and passions. It is also a great play. Written 15 years ago, it re-emerges in David Leveaux's masterfully structured, hauntingly sensitive production as a classic, increasing its stature as time endows it with greater and greater resonance. Stoppard's writing glows and prickles with intelligence, but it is intelligence with a heart. The dialogue glitters with a ruthless, dangerous, punctilious wit; underneath, a sense of hurt and heartbreak gathers and swells. The more sparkling the wit, the greater the desolation: in this sense, Stoppard's style is a function of pain. He has no equal today as the cartographer of loss and a sense of inner betrayal. Henry says that writers are not sacred but words are; I think he knows, too, that marriage is not sacred but love is. Love is Arcadia; you too have been there, and when it is tarnished the loss is unbearable.
In the end, The Real Thing bears public witness to private values. Your value judgments should be no less rigorous for being subjective. Stoppard's intellectual gymnastics and his glittering jokes are a cover for hard thinking. If, like Henry, you think, or pretend to think, that Bach pinched one of his most famous themes from Procol Harum, you will still have to decide which of them is the real thing for you. Perhaps they both are. In the end, only you know whether this piece of music, this love, this marriage, this person, this play, is the real thing. This is the true relativity theory of life and values. The only certainty is that you cannot stay in Arcadia for ever and that one of the ways you can identify the real thing is the fact that it has its price and its perils: it hurts what it doth love, as the fellow says. Also, its price is one which you very much want to pay. Which is why you leave this wonderful play feeling thrilled, insecure and provisionally hopeful.
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