Theater: Stoppard in the Name of Love

The Real Thing brings romantic comedy back to Broadway

Winter may have come to Broadway, but the Fabulous Invalid has a spring in its step. After a sour start, with discouraging box-office receipts and with La Cage aux Folles the sole hit among the new plays and musicals, the season cheered up at the holidays. December brought a British farce, Noises Off, its chaos as finely tuned as a Daimler engine, and Noises Off brought in the pre-Christmas crowds. Then the Christmas-to-New Year's week (traditionally the year's best for ticket sales) recorded a $6,058,815 total, the second highest in Broadway history. Last week magic struck again. Tom Stoppard's London success The Real Thing came to town in a sleek, solid new production that promises to be Broadway's first romantic comedy smash since Same Time, Next Year in 1975.

Stoppard has written a play as new as nouvelle cuisine (which, incidentally, it dismisses as passe) and as defiantly déjà vu as Private Lives, Miss Julie and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (allusions to which snake deviously through the plot). On its dazzling surface, The Real Thing is a throwback to the comedies of Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward and Philip Barry. This is love among the leisure classes, in which aristocrats of style spend their time polishing epigrams and tiptoeing into one another's penthouse souls. Stoppard's characters have always been able to skate on their plays' surfaces with Olympic-gold dexterity; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers and Travesties long ago established him as the modern stage's star acrobat of language and ideas. But The Real Thing also has a heart—warm and throbbing with the domestic passion to which anyone, even an intellectual playwright, can happily succumb.

Henry (Jeremy Irons), fortyish, is one such playwright. At the moment he is represented in the West End by a romantic comedy called House of Cards, about an architect who suspects his wife of adultery. Stoppard opens The Real Thing with a scene from House of Cards, a brilliantly brittle Coward parody full of stiff-upper-libido dialogue like "I abhor cliché. It's one of the things that has kept me faithful." As it happens, the two leading players in House of Cards are Henry's wife Charlotte (Christine Baranski) and his friend Max (Kenneth Welsh). And Henry has just begun a secret, convulsive love affair with Max's actress wife Annie (Glenn

Close). Soon Henry and Annie have set up house together, leaving Charlotte in silence and Max in a slough of self-pity Annie is so happy that she cannot feel guilty about Max ("His misery just seem . . .not in very good taste"), and Henry is a giddy schoolboy. "I love love," he exults "I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it."