Kathie Lee Gifford presented the award to Stephen Dillane

Brian Stokes Mitchell, Heather Headley, Jennifer Ehle and Stephen Dillane

Fox News

Tuesday April 18, 2000

Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing

by Roger Friedman

I've been to a lot of Broadway openings, but last night's premiere of The Real Thing was most memorable. Tom Stoppard's brilliant play, which first ran on Broadway in 1982 with Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close and Christine Baranski, is now the most impressive hit of the 1999-2000 season.

This is a British production, presented on Broadway by Anita Waxman and Miramax Films. Miramax got involved because of Stoppard, who wrote Shakespeare in Love for them. As you know, everyone got Oscars on that deal. Come June 4, all involved will be receiving Tony Awards.

The Real Thing is a comedy with dramatic overtones, set in London approximately 20 years ago. But even sticking with the original script, director David Laveaux has managed to make the story as contemporary and moving as ever.

Without question the real star of The Real Thing is Stephen Dillane. Mostly unknown to American audiences, Dillane starred a couple of years ago in the little seen film Welcome to Sarajevo. As the conflicted, articulate, sardonic playwright Henry, Dillane turns in a starmaking performance that just crackles right through the house. Where Irons, who originated the role of Henry, was aloof and elegant, Dillane is so actively engaged in the material that the other actors seem pulled to him as if he were a magnet and they were metal.

The big question will be how to replace these British actors in August. That's when by contract American actors must take their roles. Producer Waxman told me she's already starting to consider some names. Expect the crème de la crème to be fighting for these parts — every major actor in the 35-to-45 range will want a chance at being part of The Real Thing.

Associated Press

Monday April 17, 2000

'The Real Thing' Ponders Love

by Michael Kuchwara
AP Drama Critic

NEW YORK (AP) — As Cole Porter once wrote, "What is this thing called love?''

It is a question that keeps coming back again and again to haunt the discombobulated characters in "The Real Thing,'' Tom Stoppard's generous meditation on fidelity and faithlessness that remains as potent today as when the play first opened on Broadway in 1984.

In fact, the current revival, which arrived Monday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, seems even more vibrant, particularly under David Leveaux's careful, cinematic but not fussy direction.

Stephen Dillane and the rest of a fine British cast from London's Donmar Warehouse mine Stoppard's brilliant wordplay with such intensity that "The Real Thing'' feels freshly minted, spontaneous and not at all dated, as do so many dramas from the not-so-distant past.

Dillane portrays a romantically challenged English playwright named Henry, a sardonic intellectual, too smart for his own good and a man who uses his intelligence to keep women at bay. It prevents him from making a commitment, not only, as the play opens, to his actress-wife, Charlotte, but to his lover, Annie.

Annie, in turn, is cheating on husband Max, who is appearing with Charlotte in Henry's new comedy about adultery, "House of Cards.'' Life and art get thoroughly mixed up — and more than a bit messy — in Stoppard's world of London artists.

When Henry and Annie finally settle down together, strains begin to show. Annie becomes enamored of a young actor, forcing Henry to rethink what his relationship to her really means. Love, he learns, is more than lust and the banalities uttered in the beloved pop songs of his youth.

It also makes him reexamine his life as a playwright, particularly when he has to learn how to come to terms with Annie's most persistent charity case — a loutish leftist, who happens to be a terrible writer. And that, according to Henry, is the worst sin of all.

Henry, originally played on Broadway by Jeremy Irons, is a marathon role. Dillane, a wiry guy with an ingratiating stage presence, goes the course without tiring. He's funny and charming, but he gets the pain behind the writer's glibness and cutting retorts, too. By the end of the play, Henry has grown, and so has Dillane's remarkable performance.

Jennifer Ehle has less to work with as the socially committed Annie, yet she projects a passion that is not always suggested by the script. Sarah Woodward brings a tart, acerbic quality to the role of Henry's first wife, while Nigel Lindsay, as Max, perfectly captures a wronged mate's overwhelming self-pity.

Even the smallest roles make impressions, particularly Oscar Pearce's flirtatious young actor and Charlotte Parry's portrait of Henry's practical and sexually precocious daughter.

The New York Times

Sunday April 16, 2000

Getting Out of the Way of 'The Real Thing'

by Matt Wolf

LONDON -- There has been no shortage of bravura performers exported from London to Broadway over the years who dazzle with their extroversion and breadth and an expansiveness that seems to reach toward the very last row.

One thinks of Zoë Wanamaker as Sophocles' Electra and her uncontainable grief spilling over into the auditorium last season, or of Janet McTeer's Nora, in "A Doll's House" several years before that, slamming the door on Torvald, but not before her feverish energy seemed capable of igniting all of Norway.

Thinking back still further, one can place in the same category the New York stage debut of Jeremy Irons as Henry, the lovesick dramatist at the bruised heart of "The Real Thing." As he cried out "please, please, please don't!" toward the climax of the second act, when the cuckolded playwright experiences for the first time the weight of feelings beyond words, Mr. Irons pierced the air with the very heartache that was stabbing at him. The performance won him the 1984 Tony Award for best actor, while Tom Stoppard's drama won four additional awards, including best play.

As in London, Stephen Dillane plays Henry, the carefully reined-in author of a drama about adultery called "House of Cards." In the course of the play (not the play within the play), Henry's own deliberately constructed carapace against emotion cracks apart. Joining Mr. Dillane in her own Broadway debut is Jennifer Ehle as Annie, the actress who becomes the playwright's second wife and who teaches him a lesson or two about pain. In 1984, Glenn Close won the first of her three Tony Awards for the role.

But expecting a simple repeat of the affect of that earlier production would be a mistake. The tone of the current "Real Thing" is set by its much-lauded leading man, Mr. Dillane. While some Britons on Broadway may act with a capital A, the wiry, tousle-haired Mr. Dillane is too much the purist for that. By contrast, in playing Henry, he simply, woundingly is.

That is not to say that Mr. Dillane disappears onstage. You don't play Hamlet eight times a week on the West End for the director Peter Hall, as this actor did over the course of six months in 1994 ("Tired isn't the word"), without possessing an innate charisma that perhaps you are loath to identify in yourself.

"Acting can often be about being camp and showing off," he said, explaining his preference for a naturalism so intense it has made audiences at "The Real Thing" remark that they felt they were hearing his thoughts.

"Clearly, for some people there is something truthful in that," he continued. "But I can't help feeling very often that the play itself is not being served and that there is a far greater good to be had than is being had. It's an entirely personal thing."

Perhaps Mr. Dillane, who grew up in suburban London, the son of an Australian surgeon, speaks with unusual clarity about acting because he came to it as a second profession.

How do others assess his gift? Sam Mendes, artistic director of the Donmar and a recent Oscar winner for his direction of "American Beauty," said Mr. Dillane possesses a "technique that is entirely sublimated."

"You think these people can't do it on a big stage and then they do," Mr. Mendes said. "They have audiences leaning forward in their seats."

David Leveaux, the director of the new production, is well equipped to compare the Henrys then and now in a way that Mr. Dillane, who never saw Mr. Irons in the part, cannot. "Stephen is a sort of time bomb in a way," Mr. Leveaux said.

With Mr. Dillane, he added: "There is a flexibility and immediacy that perhaps people don't associate with the stage or the artifice of language-based plays. He starts from the premise that the audience is very bright, and that, of course, is what ultimately delivers him."

The result, at least at present, is an actor's actor; one of those performers spoken of almost with awe within the industry who has yet to achieve broad public recognition that he may not, in any case, want. (After all, not many ascending London performers would refuse an American agent in favor of the same agent back home...)

And yes, Mr. Dillane has appeared with Sandra Bullock, albeit in "Stolen Hearts," which is among the actress's least-known films. And as Michael Nicholson, the real-life British journalist who smuggled a Bosnian girl back to London in "Welcome to Sarajevo" in 1997, he provided the unsentimental center to a film made much more stirring for having Mr. Dillane's cool at its core.

In May, he will be seen as Karenin in what looks -- on the basis of an early preview -- to be an astonishingly immediate television retelling of "Anna Karenina" for Britain's Channel 4; already on release in England, though not yet in the United States, is the Thaddeus O'Sullivan film "Ordinary Decent Criminal," with Mr. Dillane playing an Irish policeman in ardent pursuit of Kevin Spacey's cheeky Dublin crook.

"It seems at a certain point I end up entering into this debate about fame," Mr. Dillane said, "as if I have any say in it, as if I'm somehow doing something or not doing something to attract it. And I'm not. I'm just going along."

The Financial Times

Thursday April 13, 2000

The Real Thing revisited

by Lea Carpenter