Writer: Tom Stoppard
Director: Max Webster
Peter McKintosh’s set in the best thing in the Old Vic’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play. Handsome blue-panelled walls are nicely matched with a cream sofa and gold throws. The scene changes, when the actors dressed as stagehands come on with new props – a vase of yellow tulips or bottles of expensive-looking scotch – are the most interesting parts of the play, proving that theatre has come a long way since the 1980s.
Stoppard can be tricksy, playing with chronology as in Travesties, but apart from the opening scene, which proves to be a play-within-a-play, the rest of The Real Thing is disappointingly traditional. Exploring ideas around love and jealousy, the main thrust of the story focuses on the love affair, then marriage, between playwright Henry and ‘actress’ Annie, both of whom leave their former partners for each other. The narrative runs like an Alan Ayckbourn play, albeit with the farce removed and replaced with discussions on how to feel love newly and how to write honestly. The aim for both these truths becomes the real thing of the title.
Stoppard appears to be writing for a particular audience, one with country cottages in Norfolk and one whose lines of business involve going to Lake Geneva to source antiques. Perhaps those who are still a part of such circles find their lives reflected in the privileged characters on stage.
Of course, Stoppard’s play is autobiographical too and in the original production his lover Felicity Kendal played Annie, adding another layer of meta-theatre to proceedings. However, this frisson is lost in Max Webster’s production, which, apart from the set, feels horribly dated. There are long unfunny jokes about digital watches and, like Travesties, endless jokes about the failures of the Swiss. There’s no attempt at an update here.
The acting is solid rather than spectacular with only Oliver Johnstone as Max, Annie’s former actor boyfriend, standing out. James McArdle is engaging as the snobbish playwright but it’s impossible to feel any sympathy for him. He reaps what he sows. You get the sense that Annie, played by Bel Powley, is not as good an actor as she thinks she is. Towards the end of the play, in what is probably a deliberate move, Annie delivers her lines as if she is reading from a script for the first time, hinting at another play-within-a-play scenario. Earlier, Annie rattles through her impromptu rehearsal of a John Webster play with Billy, a fellow actor, on a train to Glasgow. Riwan Abiola Owokoniran puts such heart into the character of this incestuous brother that agents should be rushing to cast him in the next Jacobean revenge tragedy to grace the London stage.
Only Susan Wokoma as the playwright’s former wife Charlotte manages to display any sense of kindness out of the main characters and the way she seems to have moved on from the divorce is refreshing. But would she and her former husband really joke about their daughter losing her virginity at the age of 16, sending her off travelling with a boy they hardly know? At this point, The Real Thing shares the same icky material as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love of 1989, which made for very uncomfortable viewing in last year’s short-lived revival.
The in-yer-face playwrights of the 1990s couldn’t come soon enough.
Runs until 26 October 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Dated
