The Real Thing play review: Wonderfully, expertly pointless

The Real Thing | The Old Vic | ★★★★☆ |

The term “staginess” is usually meant as an insult but there’s a wonderful staginess to Tom Stoppard’s play of ideas The Real Thing.

It’s a twisty, unabashedly academic drawing room drama in which it’s never quite clear whether the room in question is a real place or a play within a play.

It opens with an erudite man confronting – in hilariously oblique manner – his unfaithful wife. The next scene sees the same actors on stage in a different configuration, this time playing their “real” selves rather than characters in lackadaisical playwright Henry’s latest show, although it becomes clear that art has very much imitated life.

Henry (a brilliantly louche James McArdle) leaves Charlotte (a delightfully stroppy Susan Wakoma) and shacks up with his lead man’s naive young wife Annie (a great turn from Bel Powley). 

The play focuses on conversations between Henry and those in his orbit, always separated by the vacuum of his intellectual distance. It’s about music, love, and the joy of putting one word in front of another, but also about how approaching life with Henry’s arch indifference can beat the passion from these pursuits. 

It’s full of fantastic – and fantastically pointless – bouts of wordplay, covering topics from Japanese digital watches to the construction of cricket bats, all of which create a buffer between Henry and anything approaching real emotion.

He is a huge fan of bands like The Crystals, The Ronettes and Roy Orbison – a man after my own tastes – but, with an appearance on Desert Island Discs looming, he spends his afternoons scouring his record collection for the perfect classical track to show Middle England how serious he is. 

His first wife is treated as a sounding board for his witty ripostes rather than a person worthy of declarations of affection, and the younger model for whom he trades her is treated with such lofty coolness that she ends up in the arms of a younger, hotter man. 

Likewise Henry cannot comprehend why any “real” artist would be interested in the firebrand output of the principled but unpolished working class Glaswegian who has caught Annie’s eye.  “He has no talent,” he says, as if the ethereal notion of “talent” is some immutable, divine gift bestowed only upon middle class playwrights.

Nor, it seems, can Stoppard himself because The Real Thing is exactly the kind of intellectually fierce but politically disinclined play you can imagine Henry penning, revelling in its wordplay but pointedly avoiding Things That Matter.

Only at the play’s close does Henry’s facade slip, during a heartbreaking scene in which words fail him and he is overtaken by heaving sobs.

Director Max Webster’s production is incredibly stylish, taking place on a shock blue set brought to life by dynamic lighting and stage hands who dance along to the Motown soundtrack, occasionally interrupting the actors when they vacuum the stage. 

A hater may suggest there is a lacuna – one of Henry’s preferred words – at the heart of The Real Thing. But not me – there’s something refreshing about a play that’s happy to revel in its own literary cleverness. When he wrote it 1982, Stoppard was rejecting the glut of politically-minded plays that dominated the stage. In 2024 the West End is similarly flush with political playwrights; sometimes it’s fun to simply watch a master expertly place one word before the next in an order that frequently takes your breath away.