The Real Thing

With love, how do you know when it's 'the real thing'? when it's not an affectation, a performance? When the people involved aren't acting a part, or secretly doing something to undermine the intimacy, or wanting to feel something so badly they almost make it true, or being willfully blind so they don't see a reality they might not like. Tom Stoppard's 1982 play skips around these issues, of performance, emotion and being genuine - it's insightful, and wry, and true, and cruel, and complex, and funny, and moving and confusing, and before you know it you're cheering the actors like billy-o as they take a bow. i think you'd have to try pretty hard to fuck up a production of this play - it's quite simply brilliant. Still, this production at The Old Vic is definitely not a fuck up - performances are pert, persuasive, buoyant, and character evolutions arc with precision and grace - from beginning to end it's completely absorbing and wittily played out.

Henry and Annie are having an adulterous affair, despite the fact that their spouses and they are all friends. After risque liaisons, they run off together. but blissfully smug love soon gives way to jealousy, confidence to insecurity, and jealousy to indifference and betrayal. A meaty segueing of emotions indeed, but such issues are turned on their head by the fact the central character, Henry (Toby Stephens channelling his smugness to perfection, yet revealing the character's flaws and insecurities with beautiful sensitivity) is a playwright, and the women he juggles actresses. You are thrown off course from the off by the opening scene - a scene from his play, about adultery, which stars characters who later appear not in his play, but in Stoppard's. with reality thrown in (that this is a play being performed), it's like a hall of mirrors with infinitely repeating images. reflections bounce around so you're never sure what is genuine, true or false. apart from the idea of sentiment, that is. conceptual notions of love, jealousy, betrayal - which become real when they are recognised. the stage is set within a giant picture frame, for god's sake - there's no sense that this is reality - just a version of it hoping to explore 'the real thing' in a way that you could ever quite perceive in life. the irony is delicious. it's great.