In Tom Stoppard’s play from 1982, our brilliantly witty playwright hero, Henry, has to pick his eight tracks for an appearance on Desert Island Discs. And, as this capable revival from English Touring Theatre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse proceeded, I was reminded of what I’d realised the first time that I saw this dazzling, humorous and heartfelt play: I would pick it in a flash as one of my desert island dramas. It’s not just that The Real Thing is a superbly constructed hall of mirrors in which Henry and co’s loves, lusts and deceits are refracted through plays within plays, through relishable symmetries and ironies. After all, you can usually depend on Stoppard for sparkling lines and intellectual nourishment. It’s more that this is the play in which Stoppard, through Henry, interrogated that very capacity for quickness of wit, depicted it as both the remedy to — and an evasion from — the mess of human existence. It’s a relationship drama in which he depicts and deconstructs the process of love with forensic accuracy and extraordinary empathy. Never have three such ordinary words been granted such an affecting context as when Henry drops the banter at the end to tell his unfaithful second wife, Annie, “I’m your chap”.

Although there are points in Kate Saxon’s well-paced revival where you see the effort involved in biffing out so much effortless wit and profundity, there are more moments where it all slots into place nicely. From the opening discovery of an infidelity, which is actually a scene from Henry’s new play, to the scene in which Henry decides to accept Annie’s own ongoing affair with a younger actor, longing is in the air among the buck’s fizz and bon mots.

Gerald Kyd is endearingly wry as Henry, his stance becoming more and more sideways on as jealousy consumes him. Now and then he overplays that vulnerability at the expense of Henry’s intellectual command. But he does well by Stoppard’s famous “cricket bat speech”, one of the great set pieces of postwar theatre, and his eventual unravelling destroys your emotional defences just as his have been worn away.

Marianne Oldham is an excellent Annie, poised yet impassioned, looking for something or someone to give her heart to. And, of the supporting cast, Simon Scardifield excels at the brittle badinage as Annie’s first husband, Max. It takes until after the interval for you to know that The Real Thing plays to the heart as much as the head. But this is a good production of a great play.