Word: stoppard
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...Daimler engine, and Noises Off brought in the pre-Christmas crowds. Then the Christmas-to-New Year's week (traditionally the year's best for ticket sales) recorded a $6,058,815 total, the second highest in Broadway history. Last week magic struck again. Tom Stoppard's London success The Real Thing came to town in a sleek, solid new production that promises to be Broadway's first romantic comedy smash since Same Time, Next Year...
...Stoppard has written a play as new as nouvelle cuisine (which, incidentally, it dismisses as passe) and as defiantly déjà vu as Private Lives, Miss Julie and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (allusions to which snake deviously through the plot). On its dazzling surface, The Real Thing is a throwback to the comedies of Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward and Philip Barry. This is love among the leisure classes, in which aristocrats of style spend their time polishing epigrams and tiptoeing into one another's penthouse souls. Stoppard's characters have...
Henry (Jeremy Irons), fortyish, is one such playwright. At the moment he is represented in the West End by a romantic comedy called House of Cards, about an architect who suspects his wife of adultery. Stoppard opens The Real Thing with a scene from House of Cards, a brilliantly brittle Coward parody full of stiff-upper-libido dialogue like "I abhor cliché. It's one of the things that has kept me faithful." As it happens, the two leading players in House of Cards are Henry's wife Charlotte (Christine Baranski) and his friend Max (Kenneth Welsh...
...love another game? Of course. Can familiarity breed creative evasion? Indeed. And so Stoppard leads the spectator on a merry round of hide-and-seek. Any one scene may turn out to be from one of Henry's plays, or be staged in his mind; it may even be the real thing. And Stoppard is, as always, ready to forget about his juggling act long enough to give an entertaining lecture on politics, language, sex or music. (Henry much prefers the Supremes and Herman's Hermits to "this female vocalist person .. . called Callas in a sort of foreign...
...Like Stoppard, he is interested in shifting points of view: the characters as they were in 1976, as they were refracted in Mehta's novel, as they will be distorted in the movie. He is even more interested in the need of both the Old World and the New to convert the other infidel and to sleep with the rich, silly American (who, the play suggests, will go to bed with any winner). As in Plenty, Hare is weakest when trying to show how his people get from one point in their lives to a radically different...