The Real Thing

They say “write what you know about”. Whether anyone has had the audacity to say this to Tom Stoppard is unknown but he did write The Real Thing about a writer cheating on his wife and then cast Felicity Kendall, the woman he was enjoyed an affair with.

In this latest version at the Old Vic of the 1982 play, director Max Webster (who deployed binaural technology in last year’s Macbeth at the Donmar) keeps the setting here very much in the early 1980s. There’s far less smoking but tapes are pushed into VHS machines, phones are attached to long wires and people joyfully take the train for long distances. Go figure.

The infidelities are piled on one after the other. We meet a couple. He’s drinking heavily, she’s fresh back apparently from a business trip abroad; he’s found her passport, she’s a morass of uneasy confessions. There is in typical Stoppard style a rug pull - the first of many - as we find out that this is just a scene written by playwright Henry (James McArdle) starring his wife Charlotte (Susan Wokoma) and her co-star Max (Oliver Johnstone). We soon find out Henry is schlepping Max’s actor wife Annie (Bel Powley) and from there the deceits begin to multiply.

Not only is Stoppard a wealthy and erudite man, he wants us to know he is. His rather obvious alter ego Henry has all the likeability of a smear test but nevertheless gets all the best lines and the laughs that go with them. He lives in a world that is more Holland Park than Finsbury Park, has a daughter in a private school and writes what he wants when he wants. Only his heavy alimony to Charlotte and the script he writes for Annie deny him his artistic freedom. He rails at length about the power of words though whether this power resides in their quality or quantity is hard to tell as he monologues to all and sundry with the shamelessness of a Bond villain and the verbiage of a dinner party dullard. The occasional witticism is added more for variety than flavour and there are Latin phrases and nods to ancient Greek as if he is still at an Oxbridge college.

It must have been tempting to update the play to 2024 and nod, nod, nod away to Tinder, ghosting and other aspects of modern dating. By retaining Stoppard’s text mostly intact with only the most anachronistic views snipped out, Webster allows us to peer into this bubble of middle-class Eighties-era philandering as if we are scientists looking at bacteria through a microscope. We can judge these morally compromised characters, not because we are better than them (we’re not) but because we are above and outside and in the relative anonymity of a darkened West End theatre with only our memories and conscience providing a running commentary.

What makes this revival a winner is largely down to Webster’s vision. The use of an illuminated false ceiling which rises and falls allows for tonal shifts and a more intense focus on the witty banter and vicious battles of words. Seeing stagehands visibly moving the furniture and, at one point, performing a dance routine broadens the human context. Although a very comfortable looking white leather sofa is almost always centre stage, the direction is kept deliberately dynamic and lithe. Unfortunately, some of Henry’s speeches are stodgier than day-old porridge but, again, this is Stoppard showing off his immense intellect and one of this play’s clunkier aspects especially when compared to similar dramas like Patrick Marber’s far zippier masterwork Closer.

The Real Thing still has much to say about how men and women married to the idea of monogamy conduct their affairs, even if the writer comes down heavily on the side of the former: Max is utterly heartbroken when he discovers his wife is unfaithful and Henry weeps uncontrollably when Annie cheats on him while both Charlotte and Annie show only minor regrets about their multiple infidelities. Throuples, open relationships, polyamory, swinging and “monogamish” arrangements are still far from the norm but these alternative models suggest society has matured and moved on significantly since this play first came out.

The Real Thing continues at the OId Vic until 26 October.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan