Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing returns to the Old Vic with a storming performance from James McArdle
“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are”
You know you’ve been watching theatre too long when venues start repeating themselves. I first saw Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing in 2010 with a classy Toby Stephens/Hattie Morahan/Barnaby Kay/Fenella Woolgar combo and now the play has returned to the Old Vic 14 years later. I didn’t much care for it then, as a baby blogger, nor in 2015 with a starry Broadway production (Ewan McGregor/Maggie Gyllenhaal/Josh Hamilton/Cynthia Nixon) and despite another good cast here, I’m still not warming up to its metatheatrical shenanigans.
They say write what you know and so we have Henry, a middle-aged playwright pedantic about linguistic precision but much less confined by his marital vows as he’s sleeping with another woman, Annie, an actress in his play – in real life, Stoppard had an affair with…an actress in his play, Felicity Kendal no less. Thus plays out an exploration of the “best” way to create art, whether through living it and replicating it in every messy detail or by crafting transcendental text that lays bare fundamental truths about the human condition. Guess which one Henry advocates.
The arguments about high and low culture are theoretically interesting but Stoppard can’t help but stack the deck in his/Henry’s favour as plays within plays layer in yet more complexity. James McArdle makes a passionate case too with a storming performance that almost makes you forget the innate hypocrisy at play here; Bel Powley as Annie and Susan Wokoma as Charlotte, Henry’s wife, have to work much harder to flesh out their characters to an equitable degree so that they’re not walked over roughshod, but rather can match the verbosity in power.
Max Webster’s production does look a treat, Peter McKintosh’s set and Richard Howell’s lighting demarcating fiction from life, as far as it can be here, and musical interludes are amusingly done, particularly in the interactions between actors and stagehands. But for all this, The Real Thing still feels like Stoppard being tricksy rather than profound, although I’m clearly in the minority in this regard. You can’t say I haven’t tried – maybe I’ll give the play another go at the Old Vic’s next revival of it in…2038?
