The Real Thing

1999 - 2000

Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore

Broadway Yearbook 1999-2000

A RELEVANT AND IRREVERENT RECORD

Publisher's description:  "Featuring a comprehensive discussion of every show that opened on Broadway during the 1999-2000 season..."

Contains a six-page write-up of The Real Thing.

Newsday

Sunday December 31, 2000

THE YEAR'S 10 BEST IN THEATER  (an excerpt)

Revived and Kicking / Theater was back to its old self, thanks to a healthy roster of revivals and imports

review by Linda Winer

THIS IS ALARMING. I have been enjoying upbeat thoughts about the theater year. I've been marveling about the quality and quantity of offerings in a world where, only last century, the season had pretty much shriveled to the spring weeks before the Tony Awards.

Although we wrote unending stories about how American musicals wrenched back the action from the British, I now have to stretch back into 1999 to include a few local shows on this list. And though I would not have described 2000 as a year especially dominated by oldies, I find that my most treasured evenings were spent with revivals of some of my favorite plays from the past 30 years. What's more, I don't particularly think of myself as an Anglophile, but half of my cherished memories are London imports. Oh, well. At least it was hard this year to keep my list down to 10.

1. "The Real Thing": In David Leaveaux' burning yet cool British revival, Tom Stoppard's most personal and accessible play is shown to be a romantic serio-comedy that uses a Chinese box of dizzying literary devices to express devastating compassion for the most basic of elusive emotions. (Closed, but Stoppard's "Invention of Love" finally has its Broadway premiere in late March.)

2. "Copenhagen"

3. "Jitney"

4. "Tiny Alice"

5. "The Waverly Gallery"

6. "Betrayal"

7. "The Unexpected Man"

8. "Contact" and "James Joyce's The Dead"

9. "True West"

Financial Times

Thursday January 20, 2000

Dillane gives us the real thing again

review by Alastair Macaulay

In Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, Stephen Dillane gives one of the greatest performances that London has seen in recent years. It is easy to be enchanted by him, and finally to be deeply moved.

This production of The Real Thing (1982), directed by David Leveaux, was new last year at the Donmar Warehouse. Now it is in the West End, and it will soon go to Broadway, where I hope it wins all the acclaim it deserves. Stoppard's play is a wonder. With Arcadia, it is one of his two greatest works of art.

It is about both love and art, and it is wise, witty, and astonishing through and through. Although this is the third time I have seen this production, innumerable points in the play still take me by surprise.

Dillane first becomes enchanting here by virtue of his wit and relaxation. The role of the playwright Henry here is Stoppard's most autobiographical; there are times when Stoppard seems to lay bare every layer of his being to us. Dillane's very eyes seem to dance as his dry voice piles one dazzling Stoppard joke upon another. And the dryness of his voice is perfect, too: for - Stoppard shows us, amazingly - a certain lack of human juice goes with all Henry's brilliance.

The actors are still learning to adjust the play to the (relatively) big theatre without destroying the production's original chamber intimacy, and it's interesting to see the ways in which Dillane in particular is reaccentuating certain passages. There are heartstopping pauses, bewildering stillnesses, rapid flights of feeling and wit, which come here with extraordinary spontaneity and the greatest dynamic contrast. The great speech comparing a play to a cricket-bat is so funny that it wins a round of applause. And then, as he learns new areas of pain and jealousy, he is physically wracked. The virtuoso learns vulnerability. And yet Dillane performs all this lightly, transparently.

Financial Times

Wednesday December 29, 1999

Rave notices as the curtain falls on the year  (an excerpt)

review by Alastair Macaulay

Throughout 1999, there have been evenings - afternoons, too - when there was nowhere I would rather be than the theatre I was in at the time. The highs of British theatre-going are still great peaks.

The Independent

Sunday June 6, 1999

If it's sex you're after, then David Leveaux is your man  (an excerpt)

The Real Thing, Donmar Warehouse

review by Robert Butler

One of the hardest tricks in theatre is to get actors to hold each other close, kiss and caress without the audience squirming in their seats at the clunkiness of it all. Very few directors can pull this off. David Leveaux is one.

Nine years ago, he directed a production of Therese Raquin with Joanne Pearce as Therese and Neil Pearson as Laurent, which was so steamy the stage managers referred to it as "When Terry and Larry Get Laid". With his revival of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play, The Real Thing, Leveaux reasserts his claim to be the theatre's leading director of nookie. Seeing this production at the Donmar, it's impossible not to think what he might have achieved with Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room.

Leveaux has cast this revival very cleverly with two enormously attractive actors in the leads. As Henry, the wispy, pedagogic playwright, Stephen Dillane is perfect because he can act intelligence naturally. He convinces us that there's no line that Stoppard could come up with that mightn't have occurred to him on his own. His eyes dart, his eyebrows arch, his fingers tug at his ear lobes. This underlying alertness provides the springboard for the early badinage. He also knows quickness doesn't mean speed and leaves a wonderful yawning gap before responding with the funniest line of the evening. His restlessness gradually metamorphoses into something injured, reflective and profound.

This review can hardly do justice to Jennifer Ehle's physical appeal. Somone will need to write her a sonnet. But her luminous performance is fascinating for the way it walks a tightrope between smiles and tears without turning cute. As Annie, the actress moving between husbands, Ehle is eloquent and forceful. Even in her extreme emotional moments, she never loses her resonance.

Daily Mail

Thursday June 3, 1999

review by Michael Coveney

THE test of a good play might be that it is still performed in 50 years' time.

Tom Stoppard's most directly emotional play is well on the way.

Sixteen years after Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal led the London cast, shortly followed by Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close in New York, Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle did the business last night at the Donmar.

Dillane plays Henry, a playwright afflicted by detachment, obsessed with pop music and convinced that writers aren't sacred but words are.

Yes, a little like Sir Tom himself, you think, except that Mr Dillane looks like a scruffy version of Martin Amis, only taller.

And the delectable Miss Ehle -glistening and slippery like her name -plays the married actress he steals from the actor first seen appearing in his own play about jealousy and adultery.

First time round, the play felt like a personal statement of what matters in art and relationships.

It still does. The speech in which Henry declares that a cricket bat is sprung like a dance floor and designed to dispatch balls a long way with minimal effort - 'What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats' - is as close to a Stoppardian credo as we will ever hear in the theatre.

Cleverly, it serves the purpose of rebutting the artistic validity of a criminal lout with language whose Leftwing cause Annie has espoused.

With a beautiful irony, Henry becomes enslaved by his emotions and ends up rewriting the criminal's lousy television play. Miss Ehle, if anything, plays too much emotion, not enough thought. And she's a little too timid too often.

Otherwise David Leveaux's production is spot-on, cool, clean and clinical on a lovely design of sheet metal panels by Vicki Mortimer. And there is super support from Nigel Lindsay and Sarah Woodward. Almost every line is to be relished, even the throwaways such as the one about the daughter who ate like a horse until she had one.

Evening Standard

Thursday July 3, 1999

FIRST NIGHT

The Real Thing

review by Nicholas De Jongh

DELIVER us from plays in which brilliant, middle-aged playwrights succumb to adultery, betrayal and true love with gorgeous young actresses.

I would have argued so until last night when Tom Stoppard's 17- year-old poignant comedy about just such a man made nonsense of my conviction. The Real Thing does not just make sympathetic, searching fun of people caught in the toils of adultery. It ignores the lure of romantic cliches and stages a compelling journey in which Henry, a middle-aged playwright, comes to understand and accept a new version of erotic love. A rivetting Stephen Dillane, whose elitist Henry rarely raises voice, eyebrow or emotional temperature, camouflages his pain like a soldier.

This being Stoppard country, a place where you cannot avoid warning signs that a superior intelligence is at work, The Real Thing keeps raising questions about what's real and faked and involves more than the wrecking of two marriages. Vicki Mortimer's stage set, with sliding panels, a vague impression of smart living and too many props pushed around, reminds you Stoppard's emphasis is on what people do to each other, not where they are.

The first rather Pinteresque scene, where a woman's adulterous liaison is revealed to her husband, turns out merely to be an extract from Henry's West End play.

This dramatisation proves to be the fictitious premonition of the adultery, jealousies and marriage break-up in which the two actors are involved in real life. For the actress in the play is Henry's actual, scathing spouse Charlotte (impressive Sarah Compelling journey into pains and pleasures of erotic love Woodward). And the actor is Max, whose actress-wife, Annie, has already launched her affair with Henry. The disturbing parallel between art and real-life experience, between the artificial and authentic, runs all through the play: Annie, whom the fabulous Jennifer Ehle powerfully makes a fraught, alluring girl who responds to each true nudge of desire, is seen playing a Jacobean heroine in love with her own brother.

The passion on stage then blazes into a real-life affair between the two actors.

The impact of Annie's betrayal upon Henry leads to the difficult heart of Stoppard's play. David Leveaux's deft production has revelled in the cleverness of Stoppard's wit and humour at the expense of marriage breakers.

But now the tone changes, like darkness sweeping down. Henry believes true lovers know each other completely, with all masks down, and as no one else can. But he's staging a romantic fiction in his mind no more "real" than a performance.

Dillane at this point does something remarkable. All along he has played with a quiet, relaxed naturalness rarely seen on stage. When his loftily superior Henry slips to human level and feels the pain of sexual jealousy, Dillane hardly lets slip a flicker of emotion as he prepares for the "real thing" of love - to accept its limits and derelictions, while keeping his faith in the errant Annie alive. He puts on a brave, stoic front which is far more affecting than mere histrionics.

The Music