‘The Real Thing’ at the Old Vic Explained: A Play For The Times or Of Its Time?

Editor's Note: Amy's intriguing piece explores The Real Thing in depth, remarking upon story and script choices that reveal major spoilers. This is not intended to be a mere review of the play, but probes farther and questions harder. I hope you enjoy her good writing as much as I had the pleasure of reviewing it.

In 1982, Tom Stoppard penned a highly provoking rumination on love, writing, and the struggle between passion and intellectualism. Thirty years later today, these themes in The Real Thing remain the timeless focus of artists and writers, most recently in a revival at the Old Vic under the helm of Tony- and Olivier-winning director Max Webster. Many of Stoppard’s ideas continue to rouse and divert audiences, and his wit and ingenuity with words is unreckonable. But in some places, our vast social evolution since the 1980s, especially with regards to sex and gender politics, and the treatment of class, is more pronounced than in others.

Henry (James McArdle) is our protagonist: a snarky, well-off, forty-something playwright who "thinks he has a sense of humour, but what he has is a joke reflex". A scene from one of his plays opens The Real Thing, in which Charlotte (Susan Wokoma) and Max (Oliver Johnstone) are having it out over a presumed affair – introducing a core theme of marital fidelity. 

Bel Powley (as Annie) and James McArdle (as Henry) in The Real Thing. Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

When we (the audience) realise that we are wrong-footed, and that Charlotte (an actress) is in fact married to Henry – and Max is instead married to (another actress) Annie – we are presented with a second theme: the difference between love in writing and in the real world. Through these layers of plays-within-plays, Stoppard invites us to reflect on the nature of performative love compared to the unscripted ‘real thing’, which Henry finds impossible to capture in his art. 

As he astutely notes: “Loving and being loved is unliterary.”

At its core, this play is searching for a way to define love. In Henry’s writing, we watch him struggle to disentangle it from literary ideals and aesthetics. We also see this evolve again when the fictional adultery of the opening scene turns out to mirror another real-life adultery, the affair between Henry and Annie. But the fallout from the two aren’t quite the same. Max, who in his acting role remains quippy and quick-witted throughout the confrontation, in actuality falls to his knees before Annie when she claims she loves another man. Plus, Annie is forthright where Charlotte was obscure. Henry’s imagined lovers’ spats turn out to be stylised and ignorant. 

The cast of The Real Thing. Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

Beyond his facetiousness, we see glimmers of Henry’s interiority. His love of pop music comes to represent his true passion. Early in the play he is trying to choose a selection of records for an appearance on Desert Island Discs, and professes that he doesn’t enjoy anything Classical, or anything generally considered tasteful. He has a peculiar adoration for 1960s pop, which is indulged by sound designer Alexandra Braithwaite. 

With music, he doesn’t strive for high-mindedness or aesthetics or ingenuity, or any of the standards he is plagued by when he writes. Cheesy pop-music is an outlet: the easy appeal of a catchy tune and the low stakes of simplistic, repetitive lyrics. His favourite tracks don’t seem to even have words – a ‘60s song titled ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders doing ‘Um Um Um Um Um Um’’. His enjoyment of music is so distinctly unliterary, so base and uncurated, it is ironic how freely he displays passion when it is not tied to his sphere of intellect. 

By making his protagonist a self-modelled playwright, Stoppard makes it all very meta from the start. Webster points to the blurriness between fiction and reality several times, memorably in a sudden dance number by the stage hands, who break into choreographed routine in a neat piece of metatheatre. He invites us to engage in the discourse, to consider our own preconceptions about love, making clear that the gap between the real world and the world of the play in this production is not so wide.

The cast and crew of The Real Thing. Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

But a certain dated feel definitely affects this. It is constantly made clear that Henry is the nucleus in The Real Thing and the female characters are his foils. They embody less of whole characters and more of formative experiences for him, helping to shape his character, create action and set up conflict without fleshed-out personalities. They exist only to help him come to understand love. 

Charlotte, Henry’s caustic ex-wife, is his most vocal critic. She says that if he ever found out he had been cheated on, he would “come apart like pick-a-sticks”, unlike his eloquently composed characters. In the end, Charlotte shows that she knows him better than he knows himself. She represents a kind of love that Henry calls “carnal knowledge”. He thinks that maybe love can be defined as simply “knowing and being known” by someone. Charlotte, despite committing numerous adulteries, remains faithful to Henry. Despite her physical disloyalty, she never betrays their bond of knowing one another. It poses the question – how much of what we call love is the physical part of it?

The most meaningful contribution by Charlotte is her speech on commitment. She asserts that their relationship went wrong because Henry did not commit – did not submit – to the same bond. He doesn’t understand that committing is something that you repeat, that you keep doing every day, and not just a vow made in the beginning. Meanwhile, Charlotte maintains her commitment. She can predict his jokes and remember his favourite songs. Greater than the adultery he actually commits, is Henry’s betrayal of her character in writing her wrong, in betraying that bond of shared knowledge.

James McArdle (as Henry) and Susan Wokoma (as Charlotte) in The Real Thing. Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

This is a thorny subject matter. Though it becomes even more fiddly to keep track of these underlying metaphors when it comes to Annie. Her multiple affairs, first against Max and then against Henry, are borne with confidence almost as though she has no sympathy at all. 

As a character in and of herself, it makes her difficult to warm to. But for Henry, she represents an honesty in marriage that he must reckon with. If they are committed to one another, her affair can become a lenience that their commitment can stretch to bear the strain of. “I have to choose who I hurt and I choose you, because I’m yours,” she says. Henry’s final challenge is to face up to a relationship in which he doesn’t know whether his wife is betraying him or not, and trusting her commitment to him anyway.

Stoppard’s female characters are hard surfaces for Henry to pinball against. Through them, he explores how we can reckon with the fact that love is fluid, erratic, and undefinable, but for the constancy of the deep understanding you share with another, throughout change.

Debbie (pictured left) in The Real Thing. Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

The conundrum of fidelity is tied together by Debbie (Karise Yansen), the daughter of Henry and Charlotte and the play’s most multifaceted female character, a punk who loves horse-riding. She makes a radical thesis on love and fidelity, that it isn’t about “sex or no sex”. Her assertion that sex isn’t the great mysterious thing that it’s made out to be, and rather just simple biology, steeped in “propaganda”, is a progressive idea even for today’s audiences. Though used in a round-about way of  justifying adultery (perhaps not the most clear-cut thing to resolve), the idea that sex is not the be-all-or-end-all of romantic relationships is subversive. It touches on similar questions of sexuality and monogamy being explored in the media today.

The class issues in the play also need addressing. Henry’s defining aspect is his pretentiousness, of which the play purports to be self-aware. But even for the hardiest intellectuals, his endless armoury of retorts, grammatical corrections and lofty references are a lot. 

And perhaps the play’s biggest fumbling of subject matter is the character of Brodie, the working-class, left-wing radical. Although he doesn’t feature for most of the action, he often becomes the topic of everyone else’s debate, where his positionality as a private in the army and the only working-class character is treated patronisingly. Brodie exists to raise questions over who has the right to create art; should it be judged by passion, or literary merit? 

He is framed to become a bigoted caricature of the working-class left. Absent throughout most of the action, he is referenced through insults and exaggerated Scottish accents – Webster included these throughout the play even though the comedy wears off. When Brodie finally appears on stage, he is presented as brutish and argumentative, and we close with an image of the triumphing elites.

Max, as played by Oliver Johnstone, in The Real Thing. Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

There is so much packed into this play that it needs a thorough read-through afterwards to fully understand its intricacies. In one viewing you try to syphon as much meaning as you can, but a lot gets inevitably lost in the rapid word-play. This is to the detriment of some characters, especially Annie, whose incentives are ambiguous even in close reading. 

While the datedness can make some parts hard to swallow, perhaps it is a necessary artefact, to be revised, or reframed, in its next staging. The expert use of language, profound ideas, and timeless themes are worth reviving. Stoppard’s writing is tricky and dense, but once you crack the hard shell of his encrypted word games, it sings with an ingenious thesis on love and its different forms.

The Real Thing played at the Old Vic from 22 August, 2024, to 26 October, 2024.