Stoppard in the Name of Love

(2 of 4)

Henry sounds like an ideal husband: fond and fun to be with, proudly faithful (this time), tamping down his jealousy when a randy actor makes a play for his girl. But Annie's spirit of romance rejects stasis, and after two years with Henry, she finds his complaisance can easily be taken for complacence. So off she goes, on a crusade and a tryst. Her crusade takes the surly form of one Private Brodie (Vyto Ruginis). He followed Annie to an antinuke demonstration, got himself imprisoned for a gesture of incendiary bravado, and has now turned the incident into a hamfisted play, which Henry mischievously describes as being "half as long as Das Kapital and only twice as funny." Annie's eventual co-star in the TV production of Brodie's play is a rambunctious calf named Billy (Peter Gallagher), with whom she falls into a desultory affair. At first Henry wants to rise above this challenge to his emotional equilibrium, but before long his puppy-dog passion has burst into howling-wolf pain.

Stoppard, in New York to cut and shape The Real Thing for its Broadway opening, says that one of the challenges he set himself was "to structure a play by repeating a given situation—a man in a room with his wife showing up—three times, each differently." When he determines that his wife has deceived him, the House of Cards architect opts for deranged sangfroid; Max slobbers into an impotent sulk; and Henry behaves as a gentleman and a squaller. A scene from Brodie's play also shows up in three different contexts.

But Stoppard, a stage-qrafty glazier of fun-house mirrors, does not stop there. He has mined his play with parallel phrases and repeated allusions that reverberate in the mind's ear: everything from selfish architects to messy handkerchiefs, from Strauss to sour-cream dips, from Lake Geneva to the aphrodisiacal effect on actresses of playing Annabella in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Watching all this, Stoppard's audience is often left wondering what is play and what is the real thing.

In Peter Wood's original London production, play was the thing. Though no character's emotion was stinted, that Real Thing emphasized the artifice. It might have been written not by Stoppard but by Henry himself. It might even have taken place inside the Alpine glass globe the architect shakes at the end of the House of Cards scene. As Stoppard notes, "The set [by Carl Toms] was more stylized, with a series of screens used to reveal each scene. Peter saw a spare set with a Japanese feeling." (For the Broadway version, Tony Walton has designed a revolving stage of handsome, naturalistic sets that look very much lived in.) Among an impeccable London cast, Felicity Kendal grounded Annie in a roguish common sense, while Roger Rees, as Henry, soared and swooped like a Thunderbirds stunt pilot.