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.

---

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?

---

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…