A man so virtuosically witty he has an adjective named after him, the opening scene of Tom Stoppard’s ‘The Real Thing’ is Stoppardian to the point of parody. We meet a waspishly witty husband - Oliver Johnstone‘s Max - who barrages his wife Charlotte (Susan Wokoma) with inane but aggressive queries about her recent work tip abroad before casually revealing that he found her passport and she couldn’t have been in Switzerland – she has clearly been having an affair.
To more earthbound writers that might be the set up for the play proper, but inevitably Stoppard is cleverer than that: the start of his 1982 comedy ‘The Real Thing’ is a feint, a scene from a play within the play by Henry (James McArdle), a Stoppard-proxy playwright who we meet fretting over his song selections for that weekend’s ‘Desert Island Discs’, on which he will be a guest. Wokoma’s Charlotte is in fact his actress wife; in the opening scene they’re having her co-star Max (Johnstone) and his wife Annie (Bel Powley) over for drinks and nibbles. Charlotte and Max are having an affair in the play; Henry and Annie are having an affair for real.
It’s a dazzlingly arch exploration of performative identity: Charlotte plays the perfect hostess, though she’s deeply annoyed at Max and Annie coming around; Henry and Annie play distant strangers, although they’re hardly that; and Henry is engaged in the fabrication of his own personality for ‘Desert Island Discs’ – he’s workshopping a list of classical pieces to present as his most-loved tracks, considering it shameful to admit he’s actually a fan of dumb ’60s pop singles.
I’m hazy as to the ins and outs of Stoppard’s lovelife during this era, but I’m dimly aware he was a naughty boy. ‘The Real Thing’ presents itself as a dizzyingly clever bit of autobiographical exploration, examining love, fidelity, writing and the faces we choose to present to the world – the title could refer (with heavy irony) to any of these things.
With a lovely deep blue living room set from Peter McKintosh that simultaneously looks like a cosy home and an obvious imitation of one – the scene changes are enacted with an entertaining laboriousness – Max Webster’s production is direct and accessible, making Stoppard’s potentially fiddly 1982 smash feel robustly comfortable on the Vic’s huge stage.
McArdle is the key, though. He’s so prodigiously good as Henry that he simply powers us through the first half’s potentially off putting archness. Spending much of the play gallivanting around in his socks and pants, doing little shuffling dances across the floor, he’s both ironic and impassioned in his approach to Henry’s peculiar mix of superficial hangups and not giving a damn. Certainly he gives him full life: we’re not just watching a man do a Stoppard impression.
The great masterstroke of the play is to make a colossal emotional gearshift in the second act without really looking like it’s doing it. How does Henry go from brazenly not caring about anything to an emotional wreck? It’s not as simple as him fretting over Annie’s loyalty to him: an exquisitely written encounter with his sparky teenage daughter Debbie (Karise Yansen) seems to strip him of his pretensions. Earlier Henry complains to Annie that he can’t write a play about love without it being mannered or mawkish; but by the end Stoppard has done exactly that.
Compared to the more-tightly constructed likes of ‘Arcadia’ or ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ there’s a sense of Stoppard floundering brilliantly until he finally hits on the emotional payoff he’s been hoping for. Webster provides a steadying hand as director and Powley is excellent as a woman who obstinately refuses to become jaded. But this absolutely would not work without McArdle, whose combination of louche intellectualism, ebullient physicality and startling inner seriousness is just perfect – he plays the complicated role like some sort of esoteric string instrument. If it’s ambiguous exactly what the title of the play may refer to, there’s little denying that James McArdle is the real thing.