He
leaves his first wife Charlotte (Sarah Woodward) with nary a regret when
he falls in love with Annie (Ehle), also an actress. At the end of the
first act, when Annie not-so-playfully teases him about his lack of
jealousy, Henry responds by admitting it’s because he feels
“superior” in his knowledge of loving and being loved. He relishes
“the insularity of passion ... the way it blurs the distinction between
everyone who isn’t one’s lover ... There’s you and there’s
them.”
Henry
takes love, and its insularity, for granted — a telling detail of
Mortimer’s subtle costume designs is Henry’s inveterately casual
dress; he’s always in his socks, even when others aren’t. It’s a
symbol of his cozy sureness of himself and of his love, the kind of
presumption that can be mistaken — and is — for indifference and, yes,
superiority.
Henry
lives in a world where words and emotions have cut-and-dried meanings —
the play’s great cricket-bat speech is a beautiful, funny paean to the
power of linguistic precision — but he fails to see that he’s alone
there. Everyone else inhabits a less rarefied, more dimly lit place, the
real world, where things cannot be defined quite as neatly as Henry might
like, where love and commitment are loose and mutable things.
Henry’s
gradual descent into this sadder sphere is the core of the play, and
it’s a moving progress to observe, thanks to Dillane’s
deeply humane performance. He duly conveys all the linguistic delights of
Stoppard’s writing, the moving ruminations on the pains and pleasures of
love and of writing, but his performance has a strong, simple core of
emotional truth, a softly shining tenderness, that makes his
disillusioning a really heart-wrenching thing to watch.
Dillane
is wonderful with words, but just as wonderful without them: He is often
most arresting when reacting, and the most wounding image in the play is
simply the vision of Henry sitting in darkness, a hand on the phone on his
lap, aching and defeated by the searing suspicion of Annie’s infidelity.
Ehle’s
performance as Annie is also intelligent, intensely felt and finely
shaded. This character can seem to be on the wrong side of the moral
battlefield at times, particularly since Henry alone is possessed of
Stoppard’s soaring rhetorical gifts.
Ehle,
who at times bears an intriguing resemblance to Meryl Streep (and also,
less surprisingly, recalls her mother Rosemary Harris), turns her into a
woman of real integrity, who strays despite her better instincts and is in
some ways far more emotionally sophisticated than her husband.
When
she says, “If I had an affair, it would be out of need,” it rings
entirely and painfully true.
The
supporting roles are also nicely served by this all-English cast, imported
whole from the West End run. Nigel Lindsay is tough and funny as a
tougher-than-usual Max, Annie’s abandoned first husband, and Woodward is
amusingly peevish in the first act and later touchingly, maternally
affectionate as Henry’s abandoned Charlotte.
Charlotte
Parry is appealingly wry as Henry’s and Charlotte’s daughter, the
wise-beyond-her-years Debbie. The second-act scene in which Charlotte and
Debbie casually and tenderly dissect the flaws in Henry’s romanticism,
while he defends it beautifully — to the death, as it happens — is
marvelously played. Dillane
signifies it subtly and touchingly as the turning point in Henry’s
sentimental re-education.
The
clever correspondences of the play’s structure — the motifs and
arrangements that recur with new and different meanings — are not as
strongly etched as they have been before. That’s intentional:
Leveaux’s production makes a point of downplaying the play’s
cleverness and emphasizing its emotional veracity, and the payoff is
rewarding.
Stoppard’s
intellectual sleight-of-hand in “The Real Thing” is certainly
dazzling, but his sensitive evocation of the painful, hazy complexities of
love is more lastingly impressive, and it shines powerfully in this
production.
Sets
and costumes, Vicki Mortimer; lighting, Mark Henderson & David Weiner;
sound, John A. Leonard; production stage manager, Bonnie L. Becker. Opened
April 17, 2000. Reviewed April 14. Running time: 2 HOURS, 15 MIN.
