Theater: Stoppard in the Name of Love

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Rees' Henry was an audacious interpretation: the artist as manic-depressive child. Henry is, after all, a little boy in love with the sound of his own mind. He has every right to be infatuated: his pinwheel brain turns ideas into seductive images. He can pick up a cricket bat and find in its sprung wood a metaphor for the well-made play: "What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might... travel. "Still, there is something adolescent about the intensity of Henry's ardor, whether for the sweetest pop music from the mid-1960s (his own teen-age years) or for his one-gal-guy idealism (the play describes Annie as "very much like the woman whom Charlotte has ceased to be," so in effect Henry has been faithful to his belle idéale by switching mates). As this little boy lost in the web of words and wonders, Rees was a jumping-jack joy.

Jeremy Irons' Henry could be Rees' father. The achievement of Irons and Director Mike Nichols is to secure Henry's foibles in the heart of a mature male. He's a believer who's never lost that lovin' feeling. There is a fierce longing in the gaze Irons directs either at Annie or at a blank piece of paper in his typewriter. Where Rees leapt from rapture to desperation, Irons takes small, careful steps. "Roger is a more energetic, neurotic kind of actor," Irons says. "I generally don't like giving more than required. If a moment requires A, I won't give A plus 3 just so my technique can dazzle the audience. In fact, I relieve that they are moved by the strucyure of the work, not by an actor going through hoops and dancing on high wires." They are indeed moved. With his slim, saturnine good looks, Irons (best known as Charles Ryder in Brideshead

Revisited) turns Henry into a matinee idol, and will doubtless do the same for himself. Karel Reisz, Irons' director on the film The French Lieutenant's Woman, remarked that "Jeremy does have his Heathcliff side." Already, matrons from Manasquan to Massapequa are aswoon over Broadway's newest star.

He is not quite matched by his supporting cast. As Annie (a role Meryl Streep declined), Close, in maroon hair and Anthea Sylbert's rummage-sale wardrobe, has the reckless high spirits of an aging cheerleader when she should be the anchor to Henry's fervor. Like the rest of the cast except for the deft, sexy Gallagher, Close serves the script honorably rather than meeting it eye to eye. Nonetheless, The Real Thing is likely to make a star too of Close (who played Sarah in The Big Chill). Even in previews, Close relates, she and Irons were getting fan mail — with a twist: "One fan said she'd seen and loved us in everything we'd done. The envelope was addressed to Mr. Glenn Close and Ms. Jeremy Irons."

As for Stoppard, he has taken the play's acclaim in cautious stride. "It's just a straight play that people have spoken well of," he shrugs, "so it might be O.K."