The Old Vic’s new production of Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing is the first major revival since Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle played the playwright Henry and his actress wife Annie at the Donmar in 1999. Rather than Ehle, we have Hattie Morahan and Toby Stephens replaces Dillane. Both are very good.
The play has sensibly not been updated from its 1982 original setting (though apparently a discussion about VCRs has been deleted), and the central themes of how a brilliant, witty and charming man can still find himself having to grow up from his literary Peter Pan existence and confront the realities of life and love still resonate as truly as they did in earlier productions.
Annie Mackmin’s fluent, lively and often hilarious staging does an exemplary job of bringing out the elements which many other productions might ignore, such as the meta-theatricality of the whole conceit – the play begins in media res with a hugely mannered extract from Henry’s latest, House Of Cards, and continues with extracts from ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, which Annie is appearing in, and even rehearsals of the dire agitprop play by a left-wing former soldier, Brodie, that she champions and that Henry is dragged into rewriting.
There’s also a beautiful counterpoint to the comedy in the sense that virtually all of the characters – including Henry’s first wife Charlotte, splendidly played by Fenella Woolgar, and his daughter – find themselves abandoned and alone at some point. It’s a fascinating conceptual reading of the play, which, without making it sound unduly ‘difficult’, closely unifies it with Stoppard’s lifelong interest in language, games-playing and dramatic inversion.
This is a thoroughly compelling and intellectually satisfying reading of the play that foregrounds both the wit and the poignancy, with a more bittersweet account of the ending than I’d ever imagined from the text, or from other productions. The Monkees’ ‘I’m A Believer’ might be on the soundtrack, but what Henry and Annie presume is open for debate.
For more information, please go to www.oldvictheatre.com.
