The Real Thing

by Tom Stoppard

seen at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House on 1 October 2019

Simon Philips directs Johnny Carr as Henry, Geraldine Hakewill as Annie, Charlie Garber as Max, Rachel Gordon as Charlotte, Shiv Palekar as Billy, Julia Robertson as Debbie and Dorje Swallow as Brodie in a Sydney Theatre Company (STC) production of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play about a brilliant playwright agonising about 'the real thing' - a loving relationship - and the problems of depicting it satisfactorily on stage.

Stoppard's earlier (and later) plays are noted for their verbal brilliance, technical craft, and concentration on intellectual not to say philosophical themes, at the expense of deeper emotional engagement and very thin roles for women. The Real Thing is in part a deliberate answer to the criticisms levelled at a presumed shallowness. The marriage between Henry, the playwright, and Charlotte, his actress wife, is shaky, and completely destabilised by the love affair between him and Annie, another actress; very soon they are living together and trying to negotiate the terms on which two passionate and articulate adults can co-exist.

Stoppard being Stoppard, the situation is not presented so straightforwardly, as there are several occasions on which scenes from plays are performed by (variously) Charlotte, Annie, Max (Annie's actor husband) and Billie (a young actor attracted to Annie); but it requires fierce attention on the part of the audience to disentangle some of these scenes from the 'reality' of Henry and Annie's story. (Of course the excerpt from 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is not so hard to spot, due to the Jacobean language.) But these interpolations are not merely meta-theatrical high-jinks: they also offer astute comments on the dramaturgical problems of representing human passions both honestly and interestingly, without compromising them. 

Henry himself is given to obsessive ruminations about the use of language and the respect owed to words in order to preserve the integrity of their meanings and hence ultimately of their speakers. It's easy to take this as Stoppard's own view, but he takes care to allow both Debbie, Henry and Charlotte's teenage daughter, and Annie herself to convey withering attacks on Henry's position, a potent reminder that surface brilliance is often superficial.

The cast handle the shifts of tone and the rigour of the language well, although I felt that the adoption of 'received English' pronunciation was at times laboured to the point of being overdone, especially in the early scenes. This affected the rhythm of the play, which really hit its stride only in the second half; but this might also mean that the audience itself had become more used to the style of the play by then. The set design by Charles Davis was masterly, allowing the smooth transition of scenes while not pre-judging what the actual setting was - the revolve revealed a series of rooms in which the cast played out both the 'real' lives of the characters, and the stage scenes many of them were performing.

Though the opening riff on the impermanence of digital watches now seems somewhat hard to fathom, many of the concerns voiced in a play of 1982 still resonate today; the revival was well worth producing, and the performances a pleasure to watch. As it happens, I last saw the play myself in 1985, in the same venue.