The difficulty in verbalising emotion, that holy grail of
lovers romantic and refined, to enunciate a feeling so acutely
felt, is evidenced both in the heroic failings of great
literature and in the squalid endeavours of universalising
roses-are-red greetings cards. Sir Tom Stoppard’s great achievement in The Real Thing is
to have isolated something deeply rooted in human psychology:
that, as an exercise, to articulate feelings at their most
profound is not only inevitably futile, but just as unavoidably
insipid. The ‘Real Thing’, be it in relation to love,
truthfulness or the nature of presentation (this play’s
central concerns), or pertaining to a more general strand of
sincerity, is where we arrive when all synthetic filters are
removed, the mundane dilutions of life. These ideas are applied
to a set of relationships revolving around Henry (Andrew
Mortimer), a playwright – it’s one of those: plays
about and within plays, levels of theatricality etc –
confronted with the limitations of his art. His yearning for the
perfect word(s) to express that certain feeling clashes against
such glumly-cogitated obstacles as “Love and being loved is
unliterary” and “I don’t know how to write
love”. Indeed, for Henry, so confused has the boundary become between
“the real thing” and his sophisticated attempts to
express it in words, that an urge to simplify and interpret what
lurks behind the pretence of wit overtakes. However, insecurity and alimony payments oblige him to write
disingenuously, at one point reworking the abominable script of a
political agitator, Brodie (Sam Brown), whose notoriety has
aroused the interest of Annie, Henry’s mistress. Of course,
Stoppard’s trademark verbal legerdemain remains, most
compellingly in the coruscating exchanges between Mortimer, an
actor for whom scowling seems to come as naturally as breathing,
taking the role of Henry with a beleaguered mixture of
retaliatory snarl and sullen, humiliated dismay, revelling
masochistically in the face of an excoriating, emasculating
performance from his wife, the consummately waspish Charlotte
(Caroline Dyott: acid personified). As Annie, Sarah Teacher
tartly evokes the duplicity and exhilaration of an affair in her
transformation from jittery, diffident houseguest to an
emotionally stripped-down and sincere lover. Slightly unsatisfactory, but no fault of this
production’s, are the unwieldy two-year gap between the acts
and the awkward way in which Debbie, Henry’s daughter by
Charlotte, is handled, but these are nits that hardly need
picking. The key here is to reconcile structural intricacies with the
characters’ sentimental concerns without downplaying the
customary high quality of the jokes. Director Olivia Jackson has
struck a fine balance of humour and humanity, and pilots her
aptly-chosen cast through a variety of crisply accomplished
technical challenges. In a 1979 interview, Stoppard said, “Plays are events
rather than texts. They’re written to happen, not to be
read”. Either way, this work still stands scrutiny,
especially when performed with such conspicuous bite and polish.
Don’t let The Real Thing happen without being there to
witness it.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004
On the lookout for the genuine article
