The Real Thing (play)

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The Real Thing is a play by Tom Stoppard, first performed in 1982. It examines the nature of honesty, and its use of a play within a play is one of many levels on which the author teases the audience with the difference between semblance and reality.

The play focuses on the relationship between Henry (a playwright and considered stand-in for Stoppard) and Annie, an actress who is part of a committee to free Brodie, a Scottish soldier imprisoned for burning a memorial wreath during a protest.

The Real Thing won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of 1982 (London).

Contents 1 Productions 2 Synopsis 2.1 Act I 2.2 Act II 3 Critical reception

Productions

Felicity Kendal created the role of Annie. Glenn Close played Annie and Jeremy Irons played Henry in the Broadway production.

The play was revived in 2000 with Jennifer Ehle as Annie and Stephen Dillane as Henry. It played on Broadway and at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Ehle won a Tony Award for her role.

The play was adapted by BBC Radio 4 in 2006 as the first radio play to be directed by Sir Trevor Nunn.

Synopsis

Setting: London in the 1980s

Act I

In the first scene the coldly witty Max accuses his warmhearted wife Charlotte of infidelity. She tearfully leaves.

The second scene appears to follow directly on the first, but Charlotte's personality has changed completely, and she is now married to a playwright named Henry. Gradually the audience realizes that Charlotte is an actress, and the first scene was her performance in a play Henry wrote. She is unhappy with the play, believing that Henry gives short shrift to the female character in order to show off his own wit through the mouth of Max.

Max and his wife Annie drop by for a visit. Without the benefit of Henry's dialogue, Max turns out to be a likable but negligible fellow, and Annie is, according to the script, "very much like the woman Charlotte has ceased to be." Annie is a devoted activist on behalf of an imprisoned vandal, Brodie, and Henry mocks her as a sentimental do-gooder, giving offense to Max. But when Annie and Henry are left alone it's revealed that their fight was also a performance: they are having an affair, and she agrees to meet him later on the pretext of visiting Brodie in prison.

Max discovers the affair, and Annie leaves him to be with Henry. Soon Henry is reduced to writing television scripts in order to pay alimony to Charlotte. He struggles to write a play about his love for Annie, but finds it difficult to find the right language to express sincere emotion: he is more comfortable with comedy.

Act II

Two years later, Henry's play about Annie remains unwritten. Annie asks him to ghost-write a play by the prisoner Brodie, whom she continues to visit. Brodie's incoherent anarchist politics and anti-intellectualism, and lack of ability for writing are the antithesis of everything Henry values. Annie discounts this in favour of the intention behind the writing. Henry defends the importance of beauty in language and skill in writing using an analogy with a cricket bat: good writing is like hitting a ball with a cricket bat, bad writing is like hitting it with a plank of wood.

When Annie is cast in a production of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore in Glasgow, she must stay away from home for some time, and Henry visits Charlotte and their daughter Debbie. The teenage Debbie declares that monogamy is a thing of the past, a form of colonization. Henry gently cautions the girl against his own vice of making clever phrases for their own sake, but he is shaken by her cynicism nevertheless. For her part, Charlotte breezily admits to multiple affairs during their marriage, and tells him that his affair with Annie only caused trouble because he treated it romantically instead of as a source of fun.

Henry returns home in a frenzy of jealousy and ransacks his and Annie's apartment searching for evidence of infidelity. His confrontation with Annie echoes the scene from the play he wrote, but she has more to say than his imaginary wife did. She admits that she is having an affair with her young costar Billy, but refuses to either give him up or leave Henry: both romances have a moral claim on her, and Henry will just have to accept it. With pain, he does.

As if their relationship were not under enough strain, Brodie is released from prison and stops by for a visit. He turns out to be a prize oaf, with all of Henry's arrogance and elitism, but none of the genuine skill or eloquence to back it up. At last Annie pushes his face in a bowl of dip and throws him out of the house, and peace between her and Henry is restored.

Critical reception

"In 1982 this was the one that first showed us Stoppard has a heart as well as a head." - Sheridan Morley, The Spectator

"...a sentimental education in which Henry learns the gift of inarticulacy." - Michael Billington, The Guardian

"The Real Thing brings romantic comedy back to Broadway [...] It marks the return of radiance -- verbal, intellectual, emotional, theatrical -- to a Broadway too long in the dark." - Richard Corliss, Time

"True, this 1982 play [...] is also always subverting itself, pointing out how some things, love among them, defy glib articulation. But, ah, how articulately it manages to say so." - Ben Brantley, The New York Times

The Plays of Tom Stoppard

15-Minute Hamlet, After Magritte, Arcadia, Cahoot's Macbeth, The Coast of Utopia, Dalliance, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, Dogg's Hamlet, Enter a Free Man, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Hapgood, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, Jumpers, Night and Day, On the Razzle, Professional Foul, The Real Inspector Hound, The Real Thing, Rock 'n' Roll, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Rough Crossing, Travesties, Undiscovered Country

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