The Real Thing: in this 1982 play, Stoppard seems to be asking rather than showing. What is the Real Thing in Love, in Art and in Life—and in writing too?
He opens with a metaphorical parallel. Max (Oliver Johnstone) sits building a house of cards when someone arrives. “Don’t slam the door,” he calls out, but too late. They have collapsed. It is his wife Charlotte (Susan Wokoma), supposedly returned from a trip to Geneva, except that her husband has discovered she didn’t take her passport. So where has she been? Who is she having an affair with?
In the next scene, she has a new husband, Henry (James McArdle), but it is not long before the penny drops and it is clear that that first scene was from a play, written by husband Henry, in which she was acting.
Henry is preoccupied with an upcoming appearing on Desert Island Discs. His taste is '60s pop, the Crystals’ ”Da Doo Ron Ron” would be top of his list, but he needs to think up classic stuff more in keeping with his image as a writer. When actor Max and his wife Annie (Bel Powley) appear, another level of duplicity is revealed. Henry is having an affair with Annie (who is also an actress).
So the interweaving of reality, supposition and the untrue continues. Living with Annie, Henry is jealous of the support she gives to soldier Brodie (Jack Ambrose), who is in prison for setting fire to a wreath at the Cenotaph, but is cornered into trying to polish a play the squaddie has written. It may be full of passionate protest, but though Henry can give it a verbal gloss, he still thinks it rubbish. He uses the metaphor of the careful complexity of creating a cricket bat to suggest the difference between it and good writing.
The Real Thing is itself finely crafted, clever and funny; it holds our attention but doesn’t involve our emotions. Protagonist Henry has the opposite problem in the play he is trying to write for Annie: he finds himself blocked by his feelings.
Director Max Webster keeps the production in period and, with Peter McKintosh’s panelled blue set and Richard Howell’s lighting, emphasises the play’s theatricality, a new room created by the choreographed rearrangement of furniture that sometimes edges on street dance, simple lowering in of a differently shaded lamp or a change in the height of the rectangle of light that mirror that on the stage below it, while downstage centre, a record player sits on the floor throughout.
James McArdle’s Henry seems a man trying to live up to his own self-importance, becoming increasingly vulnerable despite his pretensions. Bel Powley’s emotive, sometimes shrill Annie is against stability and is delightfully comic when, with Rilwan Abiola Owokoniran as fellow actor Billy, they turn a rehearsal of a scene from Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s Whore into comic flirtation though their closeness, if purely Platonic.
Strong performances from Oliver Johnstone and Susan Wokoma as Max and Charlotte kick things off well, and they clearly distinguish their actors acting in the first scene from their characters in real life. Karise Hansen, in a brief scene as Charlotte and Henry’s daughter Debbie, counters his romanticism by declaring that marriage is a form of colonisation, and Jack Ambrose as Brodie (let out of prison) does little but turn them all against him.
It’s a stylish production, strongly acted, but it doesn’t find anything new to say.