Tom Stoppard’s Hampstead drama | Anne McElvoy

This article is from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To receive the full magazine, why not subscribe? We’re currently offering five issues for just £10.

Tom Stoppard is the Simone Biles of playwrights: the star performer who has brought more exciting twists, puns and dimensions to stage language than any writer since Harold Pinter.

Of his works The real thing is the most complex and convoluted in word and deed. From the first scene onwards, the audience is required to have a certain mental orientation in order to come to grips with the complex factual and fictional intellectuals of the early 1980s and the complex interconnections of the core quartet.

The Old Vic’s revival, directed by Max Webster, comes more than 40 years after middle England’s heartthrob Felicity Kendal first played siren Annie, whose serial infidelity obsesses her tormented writer husband Henry.

Since then, a host of stage greats have taken up Stoppard’s witty, dark explorations of the fragility of love and the transience of honesty: Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons followed Kendal and Roger Rees in the first Broadway production. Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal were the standout bohemians from the US side in the last successful Broadway production.

This version has a secondary cast: Max (Oliver Johnstone) is the actor who plays Charlotte (Susan Wokoma) in a drama written by her husband Henry (James McArdle), who is cheated on by Annie (Bel Powley). . It’s best not to try to memorize this deceptive four-point relationship – just get into the flow.

McArdle has the best lines (this isn’t a play for women that gets much attention) and comes closest to Stoppard’s spiritual world: a cultured man full of uncertainty about how we can distinguish the “real” from the dud in a world full of distractions and half-truths. Unfortunately, there’s about as much longing and sex appeal in their interactions as there is oomph in the synthetic mayonnaise they serve in those 1980s dips.

What saves it, however, is a neat retro direction and ambience – a deconstructed eighties apartment with changing light throughout the day and white, square sofas as period centerpieces.

Henry’s response to Charlotte’s discovered affair in the opening scene (a cakewalk in itself) is to taunt her with a mocking report about the business trip to Switzerland she never took: “How is Frank?” As her guilty excuses become apparent he begins with a rapid discussion about the strength of the Swiss franc and the superiority of Geneva watches. We are safely in the hands of a dialogue master.

The socio-cultural world of the early 1980s feels as distant here as the 1880s were to the roaring 1920s. Some of the more chauvinistic lines about premenstrual women, a daughter who is a Bedales-style punk who mentions losing her virginity to a teacher, and the vile snobbery about Scotland – a place you just “have to go to.” ” – have a modern unease about theater touring and thus a distraction from “real” life, which largely takes place in London NW3, via Buck’s Fizz and Crudité Dips (two compelling reasons not to want to live in the eighties).

Later, we get a brilliant analysis of what today would be called “Woke,” limiting it to the euphemisms and subterfuges of standard ideological language, as Annie helps a prisoner, Brodie, who is serving a long sentence for setting fire to a cenotaph Kranz by appearing in his play (another one!) in a fit of political activism. It provokes Henry’s anger – partly out of jealousy, partly because he cannot bear the pose of the prose:

I cannot help anyone who thinks or thinks that publishing a newspaper is censorship… or that an unpleasant statement constitutes a provocation while disrupting the speaker is an exercise of free speech.

It’s a dreary anti-Thatcher rhetoric that Stoppard is trotting out here, but the criticism of Brodie’s acting style fits the era of social media hyperbole and Angela Rayner’s new Labor style: flaunting working-class credentials, to shield criticism or questions.

It is a reminder that Stoppard is unusual in modern theater in that he draws more heavily from classical liberalism and aspects of conservative thought – the self-realization of the individual as something worth preserving amid herd mentality and censorship – and a decisive renunciation of communism compared to many other intellectuals who were apologists or relativists.

Writing itself, its moral conundrums and standards, is the question at the heart of the story – can one (in Brodie’s proto-Corbyn spiel) have “something to say” that is not well said, or conversely, can one be a man, that flows fluently into the story? Judgment but unable to act in the world?

We know which side Stoppard is on, but there is also a sly judgment on a literary scene so far removed from the working class it guiltily champions. The truth about Brodie’s martyrdom differs greatly from the official version, whether left or right.

At 87, Stoppard’s legacy will surely be his outstanding ability to combine big ideas and stage magic. This review shows us that tastes and styles change quickly and rapidly, but the substance feels achingly familiar as we search for our own “real things” in politics and life. The basic things apply.