Theater: Stoppard in the Name of Love

The Real Thing brings romantic comedy back to Broadway

Winter may have come to Broadway, but the Fabulous Invalid has a spring in its step. After a sour start, with discouraging box-office receipts and with La Cage aux Folles the sole hit among the new plays and musicals, the season cheered up at the holidays. December brought a British farce, Noises Off, its chaos as finely tuned as a Daimler engine, and Noises Off brought in the pre-Christmas crowds. Then the Christmas-to-New Year’s week (traditionally the year’s best for ticket sales) recorded a $6,058,815 total, the second highest in Broadway history. Last week magic struck again. Tom Stoppard’s London success The Real Thing came to town in a sleek, solid new production that promises to be Broadway’s first romantic comedy smash since Same Time, Next Year in 1975.

Stoppard has written a play as new as nouvelle cuisine (which, incidentally, it dismisses as passe) and as defiantly déjà vu as Private Lives, Miss Julie and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (allusions to which snake deviously through the plot). On its dazzling surface, The Real Thing is a throwback to the comedies of Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward and Philip Barry. This is love among the leisure classes, in which aristocrats of style spend their time polishing epigrams and tiptoeing into one another’s penthouse souls. Stoppard’s characters have always been able to skate on their plays’ surfaces with Olympic-gold dexterity; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers and Travesties long ago established him as the modern stage’s star acrobat of language and ideas. But The Real Thing also has a heart—warm and throbbing with the domestic passion to which anyone, even an intellectual playwright, can happily succumb.

Henry (Jeremy Irons), fortyish, is one such playwright. At the moment he is represented in the West End by a romantic comedy called House of Cards, about an architect who suspects his wife of adultery. Stoppard opens The Real Thing with a scene from House of Cards, a brilliantly brittle Coward parody full of stiff-upper-libido dialogue like “I abhor cliché. It’s one of the things that has kept me faithful.” As it happens, the two leading players in House of Cards are Henry’s wife Charlotte (Christine Baranski) and his friend Max (Kenneth Welsh). And Henry has just begun a secret, convulsive love affair with Max’s actress wife Annie (Glenn

Close). Soon Henry and Annie have set up house together, leaving Charlotte in silence and Max in a slough of self-pity Annie is so happy that she cannot feel guilty about Max (“His misery just seem . . .not in very good taste”), and Henry is a giddy schoolboy. “I love love,” he exults “I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it.”

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.

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.”

O.K.? It is no such thing. At the very least, it puts on display real, articulate people whose company one mightily enjoys sharing. It proclaims Jeremy Irons as one of the finest young actors. It refines a dishwater dilemma, accommodating one’s ideals to one’s spouse, into a sparkling tonic. It marks the return of radiance —verbal, intellectual, emotional, theatrical — to a Broadway too long in the dark.

And it is the best cricket bat anyone has written in years. — By Richard Corliss.

Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York