The Real Thing

A man wittily confronts his wife about her infidelity. Cut: It’s a scene from a play, discussed by its author, Henry (Sandys), and his wife, Charlotte (Fogarty). She demurs. In real life, she says, the man’s inarticulate emotions would steamroll his articulate language. And why, she asks, must the wife be so silent and good? As Henry’s own story unfolds—betraying Charlotte for an actor, Annie (Gillum), then facing her possible unfaithfulness—Real Thing enacts Charlotte’s critique. Like playwright Stoppard, playwright Henry is a master chef of bonbons of bon mots. But when faced with real love—and, the play incisively asks, How do we know real love as opposed to its facsimiles?—Henry’s fine words come up short.

Thanks to an utterly commanding Sandys, Henry’s emotions, at points, exceed his language. But Stoppard can’t quite express the messiness of love and jealousy rather than the tidy literary representation of them; his real loves and lives feel fairly fake. Stoppard provides an admirable defense of that by having Henry argue for the value of literary craftsmanship, yet there’s a smoke-and-mirror quality to this. The smoke clears with Stoppard’s lack of interest in his women, reflected in the less complex performances the female actors give. Still, director Bohnen subtly balances the intellectual with the emotional, even when Stoppard has his thumb on the former’s scale. This is an intriguing, deeply absorbing play, unusual in the questions it raises about the chaos of loving—if less unusual in its inability to really represent it.—Novid Parsi