'The Real Thing' doesn't quite live up to title

"The Real Thing" (1982) is about marriage and writing, emotional fidelity and intellectual integrity, high art and pop culture. Funny and caustic, Tom Stoppard's play is about a witty, emotionally repressed playwright called Henry (Ben Mains '06), whose wife, friend and lover are actors. Henry leaves his wife Charlotte (Amy Widdowson '06) for his friend Max's wife Annie (Bridget Reilly Durkin '07), who is, in turn, unfaithful to Henry, but they work it out and at the end of play we learn that Max (Chris Arp, '08) is getting married to someone else. The emotional difficulties between the characters arise from infidelity through relationships formed in the theatre.

There is an unmistakeable Englishness about Stoppard's work. His characters are almost inevitably well-educated, ironic and quick-witted, and when they are not, like the loutish Brodie (Jon Miller, '07), they are despicable. Wit, dazzling punning and a delight in talking not only identify his characters but also his type of drama — intellectual rather than psychological, zippy rather than measured, packed to the brim rather than spare, dialectical as opposed to linear.

Theatre-goers have often found that, along with their ticket, they have also bought a crash course in subjects as diverse as quantum mechanics, Marxist theory, landscape gardening, journalistic ethics, espionage, chaos theory and moral philosophy. As Stoppard himself has cheerfully admitted, he is not much interested in writing about people. No, it is ideas that fire Tom's foolery — that exquisite blend of seriousness and custard pies that is as uniquely Stoppardian as the pregnant pause is Pinteresque. But as they stagger exhausted from the theatre three hours later, they are unlikely to be much the wiser about the conditions of the human heart. "The Real Thing" is the first Stoppard play to redress the balance, and while there is the same bagful of intellectual ideas, they are not the focus. The play is also more optimistic than other Stoppard plays: Henry accepts Annie's infidelity; she realises she loves Henry, and their relationship, which was itself founded on an act of adultery, is morally vindicated when Max remarries.

"The Real Thing" shows the distinctive Stoppard traits of doubling and mirroring — puns and double entendres, but also twinning of props, costumes, set and scene structure. The theatrical metaphor is made literal many times in the play and is used to show the interpenetration of art and life. The first scene shows Max accusing Charlotte of adultery, but the audience finds out in the very next scene that they were actually just acting part of Henry's play. Later the exact scene ironically becomes real life when Henry confronts Annie's infidelity. The theatre is also present throughout (and often a motivating function of the plot) by use of plenty of intertextual allusions which include scraps from "Romeo and Juliet," Noël Coward's "Private Lives" and a scene from "Miss Julie." Most important is Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," a play about sexual betrayal and jealousy, which is put to multiple uses.

In a play of such intrinsically English characters and deadpan humour, director Greg Taubman '06 was sensible to make his cast perform in English accents. Max's accent was very well done, as was Annie's, though some of the others left something to be desired. Miller, playing Brodie, had the unenviable task of perfecting a Glaswegian accent! Performances were solid. There was comfortable interaction between the different couples, and Henry and Charlotte were particularly natural in their roles physically. The pick of the bunch was Mains, playing the lead, Henry.

The set, designed by Susie Cramer-Greenbaum ('07), was very clever and made light work of the potentially tiresome scene changes required throughout the play.

As a whole, however, the production lacked a certain zip, and much of the throwaway, deadpan humour was delivered in too earnest a tone. The understated yet caustic irony of the educated, middle-class English characters was often unfittingly brash. Certain details could have been smoother: For example, Henry didn't have a digital watch, and the very significant mirroring of costumes, entrances and even positioning of the furniture, which Stoppard makes explicit in the stage directions of the play, weren't always observed.

Taking on such an English play with a cast of American actors is brave and difficult. To inhabit such characters needs not only cultural knowledge, but also a complete understanding of the different speech and behavioural patterns from across the pond.

I have seen and enjoyed many a Mamet production in England that a Yank would have scoffed at as unconvincingly American. Being English, I felt that, though enjoyable, this production didn't fully capture the identities of the characters. However, an American audience, recognizing their own particular stereotypes and notions of Englishness, may well think it the genuine article, the real thing. Worth a butcher's.