The Real Thing? Stoppard at the Old Vic

AND: Second Act in the Wall Street Journal

Second Act was reviewed by Samuel Arbesman in the Wall Street Journal this week. I couldn’t have asked for a better review. And you know how strongly I feel about good reviews…

These stories are carefully researched. Mr. Oliver buttresses them with a dive into scholarly literature relevant to late bloomers, academic work that points to larger shapes and trends. For example, he examines studies on ageing and its impact on various aspects of cognition. “Second Act” also explores the importance of social connections, and even the ages at which people start businesses.

Mr. Oliver’s appealing profiles of individuals flesh out such data-driven studies: Taken together they form a collective illustration of how late-in-life periods of creative flowering are generated. 

As a result, Second Act became a best-seller in Amazon’s “mid life” category.

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Fussy? Moi?

Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly became an actor? To be honest, it’s more of a story about how I once thought I was talented enough to wing it in that great profession. I was rich in hope but it was a lucky escape. I wouldn’t have cut it and it’s a hard life. Oh, if only I’d played Malvolio!

Anyway, I have loved the theatre from a young age. I dedicated a good amount of my time to it. I went to drama club since I was five, memorised chunks of plays, sat rapt in West End audiences, performed Shakespeare in Japan’s national theatre. The result of my not-to-be acting career is that I have passion and a taste for theatre.

Some think I am picky. I think I have standards.

And why not? This is the English theatre we are talking about. The theatre where Shakespeare, Sheridan, Shaw, and Stoppard have been performed by Irving, Siddons, Gielgud, and Smith (RIP she was the greatest). Oh the performances I have seen! Maggie Smith in Eugene O’Neill. Edward Fox in George Bernard Shaw. Penelope Keith in Noel Coward. Ian McKellen as King Lear.

To my ears, modern audiences are not always picky enough. They give standing ovations for the merest thing. They are delighted by performances that contain more shouting than a pub brawl. I have seen plays performed with such a total lack of technical ability that they could pass for amateur shows were it not for the accoutrements of scenery and lighting and music (driving cars onto the stage, having a bold aesthetic concept, and so on). So much Shakespeare is performed with no ear for the language and no care for the sense. So many hand-gestures, such slow talking, such hammered emphasis. Do they take us for fools!

In recent years, I have been going back to the theatre even when I don’t want to. And for what? Some plays have been good, like The Motive and the Cue. But good, not great. Best of Enemies was pretty good, but it took the original Buckley-Vidal debates and made them less dramatic. Buckley simmers with repressed hatred in the film, but merely boiled over in the play. It is a symptom of a wider loss of technical talent.

So much that is heralded is mediocre. Why should we not just say it?

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The Real Thing at The Old Vic

So I had low hopes for the new production of The Real Thing at the Old Vic. This is an old favourite of mine. I assumed it would be fairly bad.

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t so awful it seemed like they hadn’t understood the play (Pygmalion), they didn’t ruin the ending (Present Laughter—my God, how could they!), it wasn’t drab sentimentality (All My Sons), it wasn’t so boring I couldn’t find anything to write about it (The Constituent). It was good. It just wasn’t brilliant.

Many aspects of the production were strong. The meta-theatrical use of the stage hands was clever. The opening of the second half ran very smoothly. Lots of the funny lines got a big and deserved laugh. The closing of the first half with ‘Air on a G String’ playing while the lightbulb swings round Annie’s head was mesmerising.

I said there were plenty of laughs. Of course there were. Stoppard is damned funny. But many of the lines got away from the actors. There was so much obvious tension and blunt emotion in lines that ought to have been plangent, flirtatious, baleful, cunning. The sub-text was often very sub. (Annie even has a line where she tells Henry to learn how to write sub-text like Strindberg!) For a play about sex, there simply wasn’t enough sexual energy on the stage. This was a bit like those productions of Noel Coward where everything has hardened into a lacquered imitation, a formalism, a puppet theatre of the high original. It should have been more droll. (This, by the way, is how you do a proper Noel Coward impression.)

Stoppard wrote for a very particular social group of upper-middle-class, RADA trained actors. There are tones and rhythms and inflections to this which have now been lost in ordinary speech. And they were often lost in this production. So often in this performance, I thought of how Felicity Kendal must have delivered the lines, and Jeremy Irons, in the original. It isn’t that remote. (I sat next to her once at the Jermyn Street Theatre: thrilling. Gemma Jones was there too. ’Twas a night of stars.) You can see both of those actors for hours and hours on the screen. We do know how it would have worked. I’m not asking for a replica performance. But it was all a bit off kilter. I simply want modern productions to have a technical understanding of what they are saying and of how the lines ought to be said. How kind of you to let me come…

Some scenes were played at the wrong emotional pitch. It went from cold to hot instantly, stayed there for a long time, and then, just at the point when in any sane world they would have built up to the scene’s climax, they flipped cold again.

However, I am grumbling, and if you haven’t seen The Real Thing you simply must. It is one of Stoppard’s masterpieces (along with: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; Travesties; Arcadia). And this is a pretty good production. It’s got about ten days left.

So, what can we say about The Real Thing not as a production but as a play? Let’s start with a little summary…

Synopsis

Annie and Henry are having an affair. Henry is married to Charlotte and Annie is married to Max. Charlotte and Max are acting together in one of Henry’s plays. It’s about adultery. A “did she, didn’t she” play. (This is all very Stoppard: the opening scene is from Henry’s play…)

The second scene is Max and Annie visiting Henry and Charlotte. Henry tried to call Annie but Max picked up and so he invited them over on a whim. Soon enough, Annie leaves Max and Henry leaves Charlotte.

Annie is a supporter of Private Brodie, a soldier who was imprisoned for (depending on your view) political protest or violent crime. He writes a play. Annie asks Henry to read it. He says it’s trash. They argue. Henry gives grand speeches that have become justly famous about the nature of art.

Interval.

Two years later, Henry and Annie are showing the signs of irritability in a long-term relationship. She goes to Glasgow to perform in a play. He stays at home to write TV scripts to pay alimony to Charlotte. She has an affair with her co-actor.

Henry has spent the whole play being formal and intellectual about love. Charlotte tells him he thinks love is a commitment, once made forever stable, which makes him complacent. He is never jealous, for example. But, love is a bargain you must remake everyday.

Henry softens. Annie comes home. Brodie is invited over. Henry turned his script into a TV play. Annie acted in it. Brodie shows himself to be as Henry said: raw emotion. He is rude and obnoxious. They argue. Annie splats him with dip.

At the end, Henry has learned to love beyond the formal commitments he has made and he and Annie are happy again.

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Love & Art

Throughout the play you see the twin strands of “what is love” and what is art”. Some people think Stoppard gave an answer to the art question in his famous cricket bat speech.

This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly ... (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) 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... (He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now, what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits.

That’s a great speech. And it’s a true description of the “well-made play” and its advantages over other forms of theatre like agitprop. But whether this is “the moral of the story” is another question.

Stoppard is Shavian. He consciously stages opposite ideas in order to argue with himself, as he once put it. “Writers who are stylists are often writers who dislike ideas,” he said in an interview.¹ Remember Shakespeare, who, whenever he puts one idea, one character type, one mood on the stage, very soon introduces the counterpoint. There’s a moral: but the point of the play is the debate, the dynamic. Stoppard is a synthetic thinker. Whether Henry represents him is quite another question—and remember, Henry learns to enjoy the emotional power of Bach, but prefers pop music.

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The Noel Coward Influence

The Real Thing openly refers to several other playwrights like Strindberg and Ford. But the biggest influence goes unspoken. Stoppard owes two major debts to Noel Coward.

Present Laughter is about a middle-aged theatrical star, Garry Essendine, who expresses a strong preference for the well-made play over the agitprop of the new political theatre. In The Real Thing, Henry is a middle-aged writer with such preferences. Just as Garry has to navigate the unaesthetic enthusiasm of Roland Maule while trying not to let the lid blow on his one-night-stand with his manager’s wife, Henry is caught between Brodie’s script and Annie’s affair. (There are even similarities about Garry and his ex-wife Liz’s life with Henry and Annie: in Coward she becomes his producer; in Stoppard he becomes her writer.)

The plot owes something to Private Lives, too, in its doubling of the couples. The second scene, where Charlotte and Henry host Annie and Max for drinks (and we discover Henry and Annie’s affair) is reminiscent of the hotel balconies of Private Lives. Whereas Coward wrote in comedic conventions, and about the romantic excesses of the rich, having characters run off with each other at a moment’s notice, Stoppard is bound to the terraced-house realism of affairs conducted slowly, in secret, and with moments of dramatic discovery (in which the handkerchief from Othello is referenced).

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And Shakespeare…

There is another sense in which Stoppard shows Coward’s influence. Present Laughter takes its title from a song of Feste’s in Twelfth Night,

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love’s coming
That can sing both high and low

Trip no further, pretty sweeting
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting
Ev’ry wise man’s son doth know

What is love? ’Tis not hereafter
Present mirth hath present laughter
What’s to come is still unsure:

In delay there lies no plenty
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty
Youth’s a stuff will not endure

This is so apt for The Real Thing it could be one of the many musical pieces that get played in the performance. Characters are always asking (both in the play and in the play-within-the-play) O mistress mine, where are you roaming? In both plays, the idea that youth—and love—is a stuff will not endure is made the central theme and question.

Like Shakespeare, Stoppard is a great thinker, not one who analyses and syllogises, but one who sets ideas in motion, has them meet their opposites, play out all the complications and insinuations in real life, not in the clear, impractical terms of abstraction. He is drawing on a deep theatrical tradition to do all of this. I’d have been happier if that tradition were more vital on the English stage today, but it will be again, and in the meantime, we’ll always have The Real Thing to remind us of what can be done on the page, irrespective of how it works on the stage.

1. While we’re here, let me point you to what Stoppard once said about cliche.

I’d write a page and a half, six or seven times, the same page and a half, and then I began not avoiding cliché, and I began to think about Martin Amis’s “war against cliché.” I got sidetracked.

I began to think that he was completely wrong about that because one of the things one uses is familiarity, it’s actually a useful thing to have in one’s locker. The phrase goes home better because you don’t have to think,“Oh that’s nice and new.” So I began to look for clichés in things I liked, and I began to realize very quickly that there are a lot of things I like, where the only right word was the obvious word.That Betjeman poem about the girl in the inglenook, and he’s such a thumping crook—if you had something besides “thumping” it just would not be as good.

Sound common sense. Orwell’s essay against cliche is full of cliche. And for good reason. Kingsley Amis believed much the same and if I was that sort of person I’d think Martin Amis’s sub-Joycean invective was all about not being his father rather than anything Nabokovian.