For Tom Stoppard, love is a many-splendored real thing, and he makes little distinction between his passion for words and the passion of the primal ties that bind two persons. Although Stoppard’s reputation as a playwright (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Arcadia, to name but two of his 22 dramas) and screenwriter (Shakespeare in Love) is based on the intellectually daunting pyramids of language on which he builds his works, he is not dead to feeling. In the Tony-winning The Real Thing, which was first performed in 1982, the nature of love as well as of good writing is learned only through suffering. The Real Thing is not only a play about the importance of feeling deeply and the relevance to mankind of the art of adroit writing, it’s also an examination of marriage, infidelity, and the fruits thereof. In the mouths of Stoppard’s characters, the dialogue seems almost a treatise on the ideas engendered by emotions.
The play spins a clever — and sometimes hilarious — conceit that interweaves the subjects chiefly on Stoppard’s mind: human relationships and the theater. Playwright Henry is having an affair with Annie; meanwhile Annie’s husband, Max, and Henry’s wife, Charlotte, are starring in Henry’s play. After the affair is discovered, there’s a passage of time. The second act takes place two years later, after Henry and Annie have married.
Annie is also an actress, and she goes off to the provinces as the lead in the steamy Jacobean tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. This allows Stoppard to throw in reams of John Ford’s blank verse to contrast with his own modern prose dialogue. Annie’s bleeding heart has involved her in the cause of freeing a certain Private Brodie who set fire to a wreath at a nuclear-war protest and has drawn six years in the slammer. She’s also taken on a younger actor as a lover, almost as an afterthought, but it’s the discovery of this affair that earns Henry a graduate degree’s worth of the agony of jealousy.
Under the direction of artistic director Rick Lombardo, the actors in the New Rep production are paced like a pack of greyhounds off to the hunt. Their speed makes one marvel all the more at their skill in delivering Stoppard’s cornucopia of language, which lifts the familiar consideration of adultery far beyond ordinary treatment.
The find here is Neil Stewart, a London-trained actor who plays Henry for every nuance of each successive frame of mind. At the start, he’s flip and skittering on the surface of his various relationships. By the end of act two, he’s been through the fire as he admits to Annie that there’s not a part of his body that’s immune to her presence in his life. Debra Wise, as Annie, is sexy and too cute at the start, as she revels in the havoc she’s caused in the lives of the various men she encounters, but her performance mellows by the second act, when she sinks into the complexity of the character’s many needs. It’s a performance to cherish, by a local actress who has not had the opportunity to explore so heady a role. Natalie Brown is sufficiently world-weary as Charlotte to suggest what might have been had she and Henry not taken each other for granted. Alicia Racine makes a lively debut as Debbie, Henry and Charlotte’s punker daughter; Tommy Day Carey is sympathetic as Annie’s young stud.
New Rep may be focused on the future, specifically on its recently announced plan to take up residence in a larger theater at the projected Watertown Arts on the Charles at the beginning of the 2003-’04 season. But the troupe’s designers have learned to use the tiny space of the parish hall at the Newton Highlands Congregational Church very well. For The Real Thing, set designer Janie E. Howland works magic in fitting onto the stage a turntable that rotates the audience among scenes in the lives of Annie and Henry.
For anyone who has loved casually or thoughtlessly, Stoppard’s planes of feeling will seem akin to Dante’s levels of Hell, albeit perceived through dialogue that layers in everything from puns to gags to philosophical musings. Part of the fun of a Stoppard evening in the theater is looking forward to reading the text in order to revisit those delectable lines.
