The Real Thing

THE REAL THING by Tom Stoppard
Venue: Strand (now Novello) 1982
Directed by Peter Wood

Cast

Annie	Felicity Kendal
Henry	Roger Rees
Charlotte	Polly Adams
Max	Jeremy Clyde
Billy	Michael Thomas
Debbie	Suzanna Hamilton
Broadie	Ian Oliver

Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal

Reviews
Sunday Times (?): James Fenton

'The Real Thing' (Strand), by Tom Stoppard plays with conventional situations of West End plays in order to produce an extended argument on the themes of art, "real life" and political commitment. The central figure is a modish playwright, much like a Simon Gray study in embittered detachment, but the play enquires into the truth of such detachment, using the question of sexual jealousy as its touchstone. Thus, with considerable artistic nerve, Mr Stoppard contrasts a scene from his playwright's play about adultery with a highly similar situation from what he presents as this character's real life. The difference between art and "the real thing" is palpable, but it is not so marked as to prevent one from wondering about the verisimilitude of the "real life" which we are asked to accept.

The plot is based on a series of illusions which are only shattered in the final moments, but the political theme is stated early on in a conversation about commitment. "You have to be properly committed", remarks one character about a campaign by an actress to secure the release of a soldier whom she considers to be a political prisoner.

Our playwright pours scorn on the idea of commitment. What you actually find in politics, he implies is a series of personal motivations masquerading as political. There is, for instance, the desire to be taken for a properly motivated member of society. Or again: "One of us is probably kicking his father, a policeman. Another is worried that his image is getting a bit too right-of-centre. Another is in love with a committee member and wishes to gain her appreciation...." All in all, he goes on, "Public postures have the configuration of private derangement."

The play is designed to illustrate this very point, and by the end of the evening you may well feel that the playwright has been proved right. But because of the way the central revelation is left to the last moment it is hard to think back through the evening and assess all the rights and wrongs of the argument. Reflecting at leisure on the matter, I find myself left with the following conclusions.

On the one hand Mr Stoppard is quite right to observe the importance of personal motivation in politics. The classic example of this is the role which class plays in the politics of the left. There is the theory of class history as presented by Marx. That is a political and historical matter. But the role which class plays in an individual's motivation is in quite a different category. Marx does not argue that it would be a good idea to affect a working-class accent, but many a middle-class socialist believes this to be a good thing. The confusion between class analysis and the affectation of working-class manners is very familiar.

Nor should it be surprising to find that, in movements which require an extraordinary effort on the part of their members , there are leading figures whose personal motivations have become a kind of fuel for their activities.

On the other hand, if the suggestion is that all politics is an illusion, that it is all a "configuration of private derangement" then the argument is false, cynical and dangerous. If personal bitterness leads me to claim that society is corrupt the truth of the matter is unaffected by my motivation. I may be right. I may be wrong. The arguments of a particular socialist are not reflected by the person who points out that this socialist is middle-class (although many people believe that they are).

However, the political discussion in Mr Stoppard's play is finally answered by the revelation that the facts as given at the beginning have been falsified through personal interest. Mr Stoppard, intentionally or not, has fixed his arguments that political activism in general is seen in a poor light, as corrupting to personal life and as an exercise in public and private deception.

This is however only one strand in a complex plot which contains extended passages of fine and painful characterisation. It is an absorbing play and, as you would expect, not short on good jokes. Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal are at the centre of the story, to which Polly Adams and Michael Thomas make fine contributions. The production is by Peter Wood. The ingenious design is by Carl Toms.

* * * * *

Observer: Robert Cushman
Playtime

In style and subject Tom Stoppard’s 'The Real Thing' is distressingly like other people’s plays. Its central character is a playwright called Henry. There is some neat juggling (including one well-contrived surprise) with the plays he writes and the play we are watching.

Henry bears a considerable resemblance to what we know or surmise – from statements, interviews and his previous plays – of Mr Syoppard himself. He even recycles some of his own past reviews; Henry’s teenage daughter accuses him of getting good notices by writing the kind of plays his critics would write if only they could write. Somebody said that about 'Jumpers'.

Henry has a big success with a play that seems the kind of play Mr Stoppard would be expected to write if he ever wrote about middle-class adultery. It’s full of structural puns (the hero is an architect whose model tumbles when his marriage does, the play being called 'House of Cards') and cuckoldry is greeted with fluent, if embittered wit.

'The Real Thing' is the play Mr Stoppard does write about middle-class adultery. The actor who plays Henry’s protagonist loses his own wife – to Henry – and he behaves very differently. He doesn’t joke; he breaks down and sobs. Later on Henry has to cope with infidelity from the same source, and he doesn’t find it funny either. We have been with Henry now for about three hours and his despair is no more moving – less in fact – than that of his predecessor whom we hardly know.

Henry combines a set of characteristically Stoppardian attitudes: a belief in love coupled with a diffidence about expressing it, a distaste for strident political attitudinising calling itself drama, a liking for unpretentious popular music. Specimens of the latter – from Rodgers and Hart’s ‘I wish I Were in Love Again’ to the Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ – link the scenes, with the implication that they say more about love than most playwrights.

I wouldn’t quarrel with that. But it may not be the point. Henry seems meant to win through – to rise above jealousy – and in doing so to prove that his author can create real characters, although people (including on occasion, himself) have said he can’t. If he doesn’t bring it off, well, that just proves that the heart’s a mystery. It’s a double bluff.

Actually, he has shown himself perfectly capable of handling people and passions, when required. Why does he mess around with drawing-room naturalism, with its unnaturally and unsparkingly fluent characters? Henry’s daughter criticises her dad’s long speeches, and then embarks on an indistinguishable tirade himself.

The best speech in the play is of a different order: Henry’s defence (using a cricket bat – a public private joke – as analogy) of literary craftsmanship against raw polemic. His wife Annie puts up spirited counter-arguments, mainly in the cause of Brodie, an imprisoned demonstrator who has written a bad play out of his own experience.

She has an affair with the actor who plays Brodie's spokesman, having previously played opposite him in Ford’s incest tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ in Glasgow. We see bits of both plays. This unwieldy structure operates so that Henry may be jealous. The various themes are successfully switched on and off; in vintage Stoppard they would be combined, explosively, in a joke. The two best jokes here are purely decorative.

Felicity Kendal does everything asked of Annie, but though she explains herself at some length, she is never believable. Roger Rees is more visibly at sea with Henry, worrying at lines that could probably stand some attack. Polly Adams and Jeremy Clyde are briefly, too briefly, helpful as their discarded partners. Peter Wood directs in handsomely framed sets by Carl Toms.

I began making my own private jokes. Miss Kendal play another Annie in ‘The Norman Conquests’ and she actually played Ford’s Annabella for the Actor’s Company, though I can’t see her doing it in Glasgow. Henry retreads some of the same aesthetic arguments advanced by his namesake in ‘Travesties'. It occurred to me that if he applied his professional standards to his favourite Neil Sedaka (‘Oh, Carol, I am but a fool/darling, I love you, though you treat me cruel’) he would be in trouble and I wondered why Annie, a classical music buff, didn’t point this out.

Feeling really elitist now, I mused if having Annie emphatically docket Ford as Elizabethan, not Jacobean, when he was actually Caroline, was an unreachably subtle dramatic point or just an astonishing lapse on the part of a literate playwright, a class cast, and an associate director of the National Theatre.

* * * * *

SYNOPSIS
by M. Berry

The Real Thing is about marriage and writing, emotional fidelity and intellectual integrity, high art and pop culture.

The play opens with Max, an English architect, sitting at home, drinking and building a house of cards while awaiting the return of his wife, Charlotte, from a trip to Switzerland. When she arrives, Max accuses her of adultery, based on the fact that he found her passport in her drawer at home. Even when he is most certain of her infidelity, Max is able to toss off literary quips and well-constructed bon mots.

The second scene reveals that what we've seen is actually a play within a play. Henry, the playwright, and his wife, Charlotte, are at home. Henry is trying to select eight "Desert Island Discs," songs he would like with him if stranded in the middle of the ocean. Part of him wants to choose something relatively highbrow, while another part admits that what he really loves is silly pop songs like "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by the Righteous Brothers.

Max, the actor starring with Charlotte in Henry's play "House of Cards, arrives and gets caught in the middle of a marital spat. Charlotte is annoyed by her husband's latest play, which she considers contrived (and doesn't give her much to do as an actress). She says to Max, "You don't really think that if Henry caught me with a lover, he'd sit around being witty about Rembrandt place mats? Like hell he would. He'd come apart like a pick-a-sticks. His sentence structure would go to pot, closely followed by his sphincter."

Max's wife Annie drops by, ostensibly on her way to a committee meeting in support of a soldier unjustly jailed for vandalism. It quickly becomes clear that she and Henry are having an affair. While whipping up a batch of Hawaiian dip, Max cuts his finger and stanches the flow of blood with Henry's handkerchief, which he promptly gives back to him.

In the third scene, Max confronts Annie with Henry's bloody handkerchief, found in her car. Annie admits that she's in love with Henry, and Max falls apart.

Scene Four portrays Henry and Annie in his new digs, after both their marriages have come apart. They read from August Strindberg's Miss Julie, and Henry muses that he can never write convincing romantic dialogue. "Loving and being loved is very unliterary. It's happiness expressed in banality and lust."

Annie mentions that one of her fellow actors has been flirting with her and then expresses annoyance at Henry's alleged interest in another actress. What really bothers her, however, is that Henry doesn't seem to care enough ever to be jealous.

Act Two resumes the action two years later. Before going off to perform in Glasgow, Annie is trying to interest Henry in a play written by Brodie, the young soldier serving time for vandalism and arson. He finds it boring and poorly written, and she tells him he's a snob. She thinks what Brodie has to say is important, considering how he's been treated, but Henry is appalled by the play's loutish language. He says, "I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem children will speak for you when you're dead." At which point, Annie rips from the typewriter Henry's script for a horrible sci-fi movie. She then declares that she wants to do Brodie's play, and shouldn't that be reason enough? Henry asks, "Why Brodie? Do you fancy him or what?", and instantly knows he's made a terrible mistake.

The next scene finds Annie on the train to Glasgow, flirting with Billie, a young actor performing with her in Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Billie also thinks Brodie's play is rubbish, but wants to do it in order to be with Annie. They end up proclaiming their attraction to each other in Jacobean blank verse.

Scene Seven introduces Debbie, Charlotte and Henry's seventeen-year-old daughter, about to go on the road with her musician boyfriend. Henry and Debbie discuss first love and marital fidelity. After she leaves, Charlotte and Henry reminisce about their marriage, and Henry learns that Charlotte had nine affairs during their time together. She chides him on his belief in commitment, saying, "You're committed. You don't have to prove anything. In fact you can afford a little neglect, isolate yourself when you want to. Underneath it's concrete for life. I'm a cow in some ways, but you're an idiot. Were an idiot." Henry replies that he would rather be an idiot than believe that there are no commitments, only bargains. "It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst."

Henry is given the chance to prove it in Scene Nine, where he learns that Annie involved with another man. She returns from Glasgow to discover that he has ransacked her room in search of damning evidence. When she asks whether he's disclaimed his dignity, he says, "I don't believe in behaving well. I don't believe in debonair relationships. 'How's your lover today, Amanda?' 'In the pink, Charles. How's yours?' I believe in mess, tears, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn't seem much different from not loving."

Somehow, though, Henry manages the difficult trick of "dignified cuckoldry," allowing Annie's affair to run its course.

In the final scene, we see the much-talked-about Brodie, now free from prison, watching a videotape of the teleplay Henry adapted from his original script. An ungracious lout, Brodie insults Henry for being "clever" with his play: "I lived it and put my guts in it, and you came along and wrote it clever. Not for me. For her. I'm not stupid." Eventually, Annie kicks Brodie out and pushes a bowl of dip in his face for good measure. The play ends with Henry receiving a call from Max, Annie's ex. Max is getting re-married, and Henry offers his congratulations, saying, "I'm delighted, Max. Isn't love wonderful?"