The Real Thing, first staged in 1982, is one of my favourite Stoppard plays, in fact one of my all-time favourite plays. Not least because of the scene where Henry, a playwright, uses a cricket bat to demonstrate the difference between good and bad writing.
This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds...This isn't better because someone says it's better, or because there's a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lord's. It's better because it's better.
Henry (aka Tom Stoppard) is of course right, and I always feel tempted to to quote that speech whenever I come across clunky dialogue and bad writing. This revival at the Old Vic, directed by the excellent Anna Mackmin, is still only in previews, but it is to my mind absolutely flawless. Toby Stephens isn't one of my top actors (I thought his Hamlet was very so-so) but he is perfectly cast as Henry, and this is by the far the best thing I have seen him do on stage. He's partnered by Hattie Morahan, and the on-stage chemistry between them really works. This is the play where Stoppard showed he was capable of more than just jokes and witty intellectualism; there's real depth in the way he probes into the phenomenon of being in love. I remember a good revival a decade or so ago with Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle, but I think this one is crisper, funnier and more touching. Lez Brotherston's set, tucked behind a rectangular white picture frame, is spare and contemporary without much depth, so the audience feels it is looking at a flat-screen television. There's a clever use of back-projection for the scenes in the train, and apart from the old-fashioned record-player and LPs, and the fact that Henry uses an electric typewriter not a computer, we could easily be in 2010 rather than 1982. Stoppard's distinguishing feature is his witty dialogue and his facility with complicated ideas, but I'm just as fascinated by his grasp of structure and his knack for keeping the audience off balance by not telling them too much.
There may be a few misguided people out there who don't like Stoppard's plays; there may be some who don't understand his analogy with cricket and or think that 'having something to say' justifies bad writing. The cricket season is just getting under way, and this play is the equivalent of a perfect cover drive.
Well, misguided I may be, but I still don't like Stoppard's plays - with the exception of The Real Inspector Hound, which was - and is - great.
The trouble with Stoppard's plays is that they are tedious. This includes the Real Thing. It's just simply unbelievable. Hapgood was so awful I left after the first act. Arcadia was boring beyond belief. Stoppard seems able to flatter his audience into believing that they are watching something intellectual and must therefore be intelligent people for appreciating what they are seeing. But really it's the most tedious and pretentious stuff. Stoppard is to the theatre what Martin Amis and Ian McEwan are to books: immensely successful and completely mind-numbing. (Only a personal opinion, of course.)
Posted by: Arnold Spoons | April 21, 2010 at 11:31 PM