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Vogue March 2000 How tempting it is to think of The Real Thing as the Tom Stoppard play in which its dauntingly brainy author at last embraced the real thing -- the world of love and lust and libidinous ache from which the British theater's most celebrated wordsmith had up until that point shied away. Certainly, Broadway has rarely hosted as successful an English import as Mike Nichol's justly lauded 1984 American premiere of Stoppard's play, which won the author his third Tony Award and made a bona fide matinee idol out of a wiry newcomer to the New York stage named Jeremy Irons. Given that Christine Baranski and Glenn Close lent elegant support as Iron's various wives (all three performers joined Stoppard and Nichols as Tony winners), The Real Thing proved a giddy, glittering night out: a comedy of adultery whose polished facade -- Anthea Sylbert's costumes alone spoke of an effortless glamour -- hid a mournful, wounded heart. Sixteen years later, that heart is to be laid bare once again when the first major revival of the play -- starring Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle, making their Broadway debuts -- transfers to New York's Belasco Theatre this month after two separate London runs. "I feel one writes plays to be performed," says Stoppard, now 62. "So if somebody wants to do one of my plays, I don't think it's my business to stop them." And a good thing, too: When The Real Thing opened last June at the tiny Donmar Warehouse -- home to The Blue Room and Cabaret -- the theater found itself hosting another sellout hit. In November, the revival won an Evening Standard Theatre Award for Dillane as best actor. Earlier this year, director David Leveaux remounted the same staging at the West End's larger Albery Theatre, gambling that his production's often astonishingly intimate effect would survive the transfer intact. Whereas the play's passions on Broadway the first time around poured across the footlights, the current production takes the opposite approach, pulling the audience into the play. In 1984, Irons socked every witticism to the back of the balcony, as befits the play's account of a clever (and cricket-obsessed) writer who segues from one actress-wife to another at great personal cost to his own abiding cool. But understatement can tell its own tale, as this latest production revealed last year: "It was almost Chekhovian," Donmar artistic director Same Mendes says. "It's often the case with hits that you assume there's [only] one way of doing them." Suddenly, Mendes adds, one encounters an unexpectedly fresh staging, "and it's like watching a totally different play." How does Leveaux account for the heightened poignancy and desolation this time around, within a play formerly possessed of its own very real dazzle? "I started with the title, really, 'the real thing,'" says the 42-year-old director, who regards his own style as a kind of "stripping away." (Small wonder that Stoppard, in turn, speaks of his play having been "deconstructed. As if I knew what the word means.") Leveaux goes on: "This is not a production, nor is Stephen Dillane's a performance, that is pitched at the level of fireworks. If, indeed, this is a play about the limits of language, its journey is toward another language -- that which occurs when linguistic athleticism beings to falter and is replaced by an autism of the heart." The awakening of that same heart has become a Stoppard motif, feeding such subsequent dramatic mergings of mind and emotional matter as Arcadia and The Invention of Love. While his previous works -- Travesties, for instance -- left one spinning amid the high-flown wit and ideas, Stoppard roots the drollery of The Real Thing in a recognizable world made up of passion and pain. To be sure, its playwright/hero, Henry, may find Bach inferior to Procol Harum, but his urbanity cracks when faced with the errant affections of his second wife, who launches her own clandestine affair during a production of -- yes -- 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. This being Stoppard, The Real Thing beings with a play-within-a-play from an adultery drama Henry has written called House of Cards. But to address a topic on the page is different from living it, as Henry learns, to his cost, once the house of cards he erects to guard feeling and emotion comes crashing down. "Henry's somebody who finds that maybe the level at which you're able to use language is not necessarily the primary level at which you should live," muses Dillane. "It's quite a complicated thing." For Ehle, the play's shifting moods have stayed with her since its first Broadway incarnation, when the then-fourteen-year-old happened to attend Close's final performance. "I became a bit obsessed with the play when I first saw it," recalls Ehle, best known for winning hearts in 1995 as Elizabeth Bennet in TV's Pride and Prejudice. "I don't know how much of it I would have grasped." Enough, no doubt, to appreciate that rare Stoppard play inspired neither by people (Travesties and The Invention of Love are fanciful acts of biography) nor plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead famously riffs on Hamlet), but by the wayward ways of desire. "It seems a long time since I wrote a play in which I invented everything," says Stoppard, while admitting that the play's substance nonetheless does strike close to home: "All the editorializing comes from somewhere near the fifth rib." "There have been nights when it has seemed very angry and tragic," says Dillane. "And there have been other nights when it seemed very flippant and light and frothy. But either way, the play just seemed to work." |
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| This page was last updated on September 6, 2001. |
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