The Real Thing Reviews at The Old Vic

"James McArdle is a revelation in this Stoppard play"

"Though it suffers from dated references, the script’s intelligence and passion shines through"

"Tom Stoppard’s wittily layered drama about truth in relationships and art won Best Play at the Evening Standard Awards in 1982. Though some of the social attitudes and trappings show their vintage – male chauvinism and trimphones, anyone? – the script’s intelligence and passion shine through. Max Webster’s elegant production even manages a deft topspin of modernity."

"James McArdle, often a gruff and husky presence, is a revelation here as the Stoppard-esque playwright Henry... Bel Powley is terrific as Annie, the younger actress who arrests his heart and attention. In a wordy drama, both are surprisingly physical: he shimmying in socked feet to Da Do Ron Ron Ron, she all eloquent elbows and ankles, seductive and exasperated."

"And though over 40 years old, The Real Thing is surprisingly prescient."

"It's impossible not to be carried away by the brio of the whole thing"

"Hang in there, Tom Stoppard’s greatest play is worth it"

"Max Webster’s production at the Old Vic, SE1, is slightly skittish but all comes good at the end"

"... looks are deceptive and so are the fast-talkingly faithless characters in Tom Stoppard’s 1982 masterpiece, here revived only seven years after its last Old Vic run. I get the appeal. The Real Thing is not the most famous Stoppard but it is, I’d argue, the greatest Stoppard, the one that best blends formal audacity with wondrous wit and, crucially, extraordinary emotional acuity. Yet it took me a while to succumb to Max Webster’s slightly skittish production, acted out, in Peter McKintosh’s design, in a rectangle of creamy furnishings amid a sea of royal blue."

"McArdle triumphs with the famous cricket bat speech, an argument for the virtue of craft that will always be funny and relevant. And by the time we get to a similarly excellent speech about what “carnal knowledge” really means, this pyrotechnically articulate yet now palpably vulnerable man is no longer just the reflexive joker his first wife (Susan Wokoma) accuses him of being."

"The longer it goes on, the more this production finds a plangent tone where the witty, the wise and the wounded are forever colliding."

"A stupendous performance from James McArdle powers this revival of Stoppard’s chaotically brilliant play about love"

"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."

"It’s a dazzlingly arch exploration of performative identity"

"‘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."

"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."

"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"

"Tom Stoppard’s dazzling comedy of love and language"

"James McArdle is brilliant as a self-absorbed playwright trying to depict matters of the heart"

"“I don’t know how to write love,” laments Henry, the playwright at the centre of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. And, in essence, this super-smart 1982 comedy represents Stoppard’s own wrestle with the same conundrum. It is given an elegant, mischievous revival at the Old Vic by Max Webster, with James McArdle enormously enjoyable as the pompous, acerbic Henry, a character for whom the term “mansplaining” could have been invented."

"It is, as always with Stoppard, dazzlingly intelligent — the irony here being that Stoppard demonstrates how a facility with language and style might actually be an obstruction to expressing the euphoric, sometimes ugly nature of love."

"McArdle is brilliant as the self-absorbed Henry, handling the script’s handbrake turns with scintillating precision while letting us see the vulnerability beneath."

"Though dated in some respects, it remains an inventive comedy that best articulates love by showing how hard that is to do."

"Tom Stoppard’s gem still shines"

"Passion and art are dissected in tricksy style in a production that manages to wrongfoot the audience"

"This is Stoppard at his tricksy best but simultaneously at his most sincere, it seems, because at this drama’s heart is a timeless study of passion and art that 40 years on remains – rather like the insides of a well-made Swiss watch – exquisitely intact."

"Not every performance glows, and you never quite believe in any of these relationships, although McArdle makes his character believable and sympathetic, despite Henry’s incredible pomposity. For the most part, it is (literally and metaphorically) the play that does the talking, and surprisingly deftly."

"Artfully directed by Max Webster, with wonderful long-shadowed lighting by Richard Howell and a poppy soundtrack, the drama’s artifice is playfully exposed, maybe even sent up, with dancing stagehands bringing choreographed comedy and a light meta touch."

"It retains all the whirling wit of his early work, but its subject is the most important in the world – what it means to love and be loved."

"At its heart is a sensational performance from James McArdle as Henry, fleet of foot and bright of mind, beautifully conveying both Henry’s monstrous self-satisfaction and his deep and abiding confusion about how to conduct affairs of the heart."

"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."

"Love and infidelity, Hampstead style"

"James McArdle is irresistible in this witty revival at the Old Vic"

"James McArdle’s Henry is a whoremonger in Act I and a cuckold in Act II. He is charming, handsome and plummy, so ahead of everyone else for half the play he practically finishes their thoughts for them."

"This is, however, an elegant production of a witty script. The other objection you might have to The Real Thing is less easily dealt with. Aren’t these just a load of commitment-phobic post-Freudian la la luvvies heartlessly huffing around their sofas in Hampstead, shagging their way into a hell of their own making? Well, yes. That is exactly who these characters are."

"Haven’t we left all that Romantic stuff in the past along with thumbscrews and bear-baiting? Hardly. Stoppard is telling us that the search for the real thing, however maddening, never really ends."

"Intelligent but bloodless"

"Revival of Tom Stoppard’s brainy comedy is slick, persuasively acted and too clever by half"

"It’s a truism that the work of Tom Stoppard, that most cerebral of playwrights, is clever. What’s more crucial is the question of whether, in performance, his dramas also trouble the gut and the heart, and rarely more so than in the case of this brainy comedy of love, art and betrayal from 1982."

"Max Webster’s revival practically glows with knowing self-satisfaction, as Stoppard sets up his lovers in a smug, hermetic world of smart, expensive homes, theatrical openings and chatterati glad-handing, only to topple them with the sucker punch of pain and passion. It’s smoothly effective and yes, unarguably intelligent. But it is also airless and bloodless, its ingenious construction and innate snobbery a barrier to genuine emotional engagement."

"McArdle is as sleek and unctuous as a cat licking itself all over – the elitism and pretension that Henry personifies is central to the play’s comedy and to its conceit of the real versus the artificial. The problem is, that doesn’t make it any less unappealing."

"Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play is the writer at his most brilliant and infuriating"

"James McArdle and Bel Powley star in the Old Vic’s revival of Stoppard’s tricksy, self-parodical play, but it feels dated to watch middle class couples being beastly to each other in beige living rooms"

"James McArdle is fantastically eloquent in the central role of Henry, a very Stoppard-like playwright who spends a lot of this play’s span prodding at questions of truth, deception, meaning and wordsmithery. None of the other characters come close to matching his rhetorical flights of fancy. But then again, they’re not really trying to."

"The Real Thing does indeed showcase Stoppard’s verbal powers. But its lefties Brodie and Annie are fundamentally unsatisfying opponents to Henry – crude and thuggish straw men dragged into the drawing room for a thorough dissection and autopsy. That sense isn’t helped by Max Webster’s somewhat stodgy production, with its declamatory acting styles and chemistry-free, mismatched central couples."

"The Real Thing offers a less deeply felt, more snobbish perspective on the ills of the left – and there’s something resolutely unfashionable about its spectacle of adulterous middle class couples being beastly to each other in beige living rooms. It’s Stoppard being his most brilliant, most infuriating self – and it won’t win any of his detractors round to his cause."

"A slick but arid story of love, lust and theatre"

"James McCardle and Bel Powley are terrific in Tom Stoppard's wordy but hollow 1982 rumination upon real life versus fiction"

"... a strongly cast revival of Tom Stoppard’s wordy but hollow 1982 rumination upon real life versus fiction, fidelity against infidelity. For all the play’s flaws, James McCardle and rising star of television Bel Powley are terrific in the leading roles."

"Where Wokoma is witty, weary and sarcastic, Powley is direct, emotional and restless, always longing for something that Henry can’t quite provide for her."

"On it goes, slick but arid and when it ends it’s a challenge to know what we’re meant to take away from it. Apart, that is, from this pearl of wisdom: never date a playwright or an actor."

"Stylish but uneven revival of a Stoppard classic"

"Max Webster’s engaging production of one of Sir Tom’s most emotionally resonant successes is not wholly loveable, yet"

"It’s a play so popular that it was seen at the Old Vic as recently as 2010, the theatre since then also reviving the calling-card hit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Like the latter, this is – at one level – an evening scintillatingly about theatre, and the roles we play, albeit it centres the profession (actors, writers) not sidelined characters."

"Though there are quotably succinct, comedically sharp lines, the piece aspires to unfold the ordinary mess of intimate relations, the way love can seem fixed and absolute, yet has to be continually renegotiated."

"In some ways, it feels as though the whole thing simply needs to bed in. Where Stephen Dillane, in the 1999 Donmar revival, was chided for being too softly-spoken as Henry, James McArdle errs towards the bullish and bearish as the confident yet insecure playwright, eclipsing his subtler, tender moments. Likewise, Susan Wokoma as Charlotte hits the lines with sitcom-broad strokes compared to Bel Powley’s understated Annie."

"Tom Stoppard’s most loving play"

"The Real Thing – first staged in 1982 – is the most evidently loving of Tom Stoppard’s plays and one of his most accomplished."

"Bel Powley grows persuasively from Bambi (how rapt I was by her first appearance as a 17-year-old in 2009) to doe; James McArdle is compelling in oration and in his unravelling."

"There are blotches in the play and in Max Webster’s production."

"Webster enhances the theatrical theme by making the gap between actors and stage hands permeable. Black-clad figures move props with attitude: knowingly, gloweringly. One of them, Rilwan Abiola Owokoniran, ignites the scene as he vividly dances. He then glides into a speaking part: agile, exact and comic: the real thing."

"Bel Powley and James McCardle are wondrous in Tom Stoppard's frustrating play about truth and lies"

"The Real Thing remains ultimately unknowable all these years later"

"... when their happy marriage turns out to have hidden secrets too, what is presented as real in Stoppard’s world becomes increasingly undependable. Of course, this trickery is essential to the effect of The Real Thing, but with it comes a degree of self congratulation and emptiness."

"This revival by Max Webster leans into the theatricality of Stoppard’s words."

"The big, somewhat unanswerable questions within The Real Thing have made it one of Stoppard’s most revived plays – perhaps, because we are still desperate to find its central meaning. But, even such intellectual prowess, can’t make Stoppard’s work an indisputable wonder. All these years later, it remains a frustrating thing."