Daniel September 4th, 2024
Opening last week at London's Old Vic, James McArdle and Bel Powley star in a highly anticipated London revival of Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing, headed up by Life of Pi director Max Webster! The Tony Award-winning play takes a dark and honest look at human relationships and the nature of fidelity and love, cleverly lightening the mood set by its more serious content with delightfully witty moments. Running from August to October, the production's return to the Old Vic comes a decade after a much-lauded Broadway revival featuring Ewan MacGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Check out what the critics had to say about this exciting new play below!
The Real Thing tells the story of a playwright named Henry who finds that life begins to imitate art a little too accurately. Henry is not so happily married to the lead actress, Charlotte, of his play which is about a marriage on the verge of collapse. When his real-life affair with their close friend Annie threatens to derail their marriage - and all three of their lives - completely, he begins to question whether or not what they have is actually real love or not.
London Theatre: "That welcome physicality makes this verbose piece more digestible, and the passionate performances help to counter the charge that Stoppard is merely a "clever" writer. Listen to McArdle's Henry confess his intimate truth that "knowing, being known" is the most exquisite joy of love, and you discover that the playwright's much-vaunted articulacy is in service of a beating heart."
WhatsOnStage: "All in all, then, this is a sophisticated and enjoyable revival of a play that still, beneath its beautiful veneer of humour, has the heft to raise troubling and endlessly fascinating questions about the state of the human heart and how we describe it."
The Standard: "It's impossible not to be carried away by the brio of the whole thing, though: the way the plays-within-the-play inform mesh and overlap; the joyous relish of words; the potent, romantic yearning at the core for something pure. Here, a script is famously likened to a cricket bat, engineered to send the ball of an idea soaring without apparent effort. The Real Thing is such a play, and Webster and his cast play a blinder with it."
Timeout: "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."
British Theatre Guide: "Stoppard plays can be wordy but his writing is always a delight and few writers for the stage play with ideas so cogently. The Real Thing is only dated by its music, which in itself is a homage to Henry's tastes that were already old hat in 1982. Otherwise, it feels completely contemporary, as viewers will instantly recognise people and situations on stage that could as easily have come from life."
when it was first seen, few would have guessed that this play would turn out to be amongst Tom Stoppard's most durable
The Guardian
