FringeReview UK 2024

The Real Thing

Old Vic

Genre: Comedic, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Old Vic, The Cut Waterloo

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

The Real Thing has been hailed as Tom Stoppard’s most emotionally engaged play; it’s certainly one of his most revived. Dating from 1982, its last major outing was Stephen Unwin’s 2017 touring production. Now with James McArdle as playwright Henry leading a cast directed by Max Webster, it comes to the Old Vic till October 26^th.

This is a play where how the cast finds an extra resonance in Stoppard’s words will determine whether you feel for them. It’s a play about plays and words but not argued: with spirited exceptions it’s monologued and mansplained by Henry. Is art compromised by raw political engagement versus artful side-stepping? Can you write about love, especially its fulfilment? Henry can’t but then Stoppard thinks he’s writing one for him.

Stoppard gives Henry tracts to speak. McArdle is sovereign here. He doesn’t neglect to play up Henry’s acerbic arrogance, snappy retorts to make a desert of love. The burden’s on the two female leads – Susan Wokoma’s Charlotte, and particularly Bel Powley’s Annie – to follow him. Henry though delivers most of the best lines (daughter Debbie guys them best); an unequal struggle.

It’s aided with Peter Macintosh’s set, the Old Vic walled with cobalt blue and a ballet of stage managers who give more life to the production than Stoppard’s words. Props spiral up (a lightbulb) or down with ASMs like buzzing waiters comically frozen as they offer a glass. The one constant even in the train sequence is the white 1980-style sofa travelling through every scene like a magic carpet out of E. Nesbitt.

Richard Howell’s lighting carves out smaller spaces. We’re bombarded with retro pop (even for 1982) as Henry’s tastes conflict with a new lover’s classical ones in Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s sound design crackling LP vinyl. Stoppard concluded when reviving the play in the 1990s there was no point in trying to update it.

Even edited, this play has dated though. Certainly forty-two years have done nothing to dim what seem now like snap-chat responses and the velocity of sexting. Appalling sexist and rape references have thankfully gone. Paradoxically its period brittleness, recalling Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist, is resonant now.

Hampton’s play pulls the same stunt in 1970 as here. The first scene where Oliver Johnstone’s Max discovers Wokoma’s infidelity because she never took her passport, is playwright Henry’s scene. Wokoma is Henry’s wife. But it’s Henry and Max’s real actress wife Annie (Powley) whose affair turns into the play’s title as they marry. No shockers: the protagonist doesn’t accidentally shoot himself as with The Philanthropist. no-one’s killed unless bubbled up in theatre rehearsals.

Hence Annie is later in Glasgow for Ford’s 1633 play Tis Pity She’s a Whore centring on brother-sister incest. Rilwan Abiola Owokoniran’s Billy playing opposite Annie predictably falls for her. Annie is older than Billy and in charge for once. Powley’s provoked Annie contrasts with Charlotte who’s quite up for some post-divorce sex (Henry sadly is an idealist) rendered dramatically ironic in a subsequent scene. Wokoma’s Charlotte begins with weary breeziness throughout much of the first act. She’s then more playful.

Stoppard manages a sub-theme as plot driver and climax. With Annie and Max, Charlotte snipes at husband Henry whose brittle denunciations of Annie’s pet cause form the unpleasant apex of his prejudice. Private Brodie set fire to the cenotaph in a confused protest at the nuclear weapons he was protecting: he’s jailed. Annie campaigns for his release; her motivations are complex.

Brodie’s trying to write a play. Annie wants Henry to ghost it into (Henry’s words again) “speakable drivel”. Yet when her assignations conflicts with some do-Brodie-gooding, she retorts: “Let him rot.” It presages her final act towards Brodie whom she apparently springs. Brodie claims with 2024-ish prescience, that lack of prison places sprung him, monies diverted to nuclear weapons.

Henry’s hypocrisy lies in those LPs, mimicking Annie’s classical taste for his appearance on Desert Island Discs (Stoppard appeared there in 1985). Henry accuses Bach of stealing from Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. McArdle mints this one freshly.

By then we’ve seen precocious daughter Debbie, Karise Yansen’s sparky delivery of fixations: all school subjects are sex except biology, though losing her virginity in the jodhpur room to the Latin master was just – biology. One period detail that can’t be lost. Yansen’s appealing performance and interaction with McArdle is a key scene lifting the second half above the first.

Soon Annie complains memorably: “the honeymoon is over. Fifteen days and fuckless to bye-byes.” Henry’s obsessively writing screen adaptations to pay alimony. Powley’s Annie should recall the sexy playfulness of the role’s creator, Felicity Kendall. Powley is less exuberant, more earnest with a glint of teeth. She exudes honesty pushed too far.

Jack Ambrose’s Brodie must be the most ungrateful part Stoppard’s created, wheeled on with the TV towards the end, to be knocked down after making one or two good points – Stoppard can’t permit inarticulate characters. Ambrose makes a good fist of a Scottish stereotype.  Abiola Owokoniran’s Billy is allowed more scope. Johnstone’s major appearances, early on, are resonantly taken, believable, and – another actor stereotype – suitably lachrymose.

Webster’s theatricality (with Chi-San Howard’s movement) and McArdle’s Henry carries this production to some distinction. Bounding in Henry’s self-regarding energy, McArdle conveys his irritating persona and what its brittleness shrouds: a passionate romanticism. “I can’t find a part of myself where you’re not important… I can’t cope with more than one moral system at a time.” It’s a great declaration though Henry’s ignoring Annie earlier when she flashes her nakedness at him suggests dramatic ironies Stoppard doesn’t resolve.

Certainly the last few scenes set up surprises, one generating Henry’s: “No hard feelings? What does he mean. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be engaged now.”

Hailed by many as Stoppard’s masterpiece, it seems a compendium, combining the exuberance of early plays, the ludic agonies of Arcadia and some of Leopoldstadt’s profundity. The Real Thing stimulates in depth, and though it doesn’t quite ache as it should, McArdle bestrides this production like a hopeful monster who’s got lucky. He’s irresistible, and especially in the second half, enjoys the support of an energised cast. Do see this.

Published September 6, 2024September 6, 2024 by Simon Jenner