It has been far too long since New York has seen a Tom Stoppard play adorning Broadway, and after a season of soggy, overwritten debacles, one is happy to embrace anything that has already been tested, and just might deliver. The Donmar Warehouse production of The Real Thing, with its luminous London cast intact, proves to be the great reminder of the verve and wit plays once had. Best known for being a powerhouse '80s vehicle for Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, this revival has a brand-new vibrancy and is so accomplished, you'd think that nobody else ever embodied these splendid roles. This is one of Stoppard's greatest achievements (his much-lauded Oscar-winning screenplay for "Shakespeare in Love" hasn't half the resonance this or his magnificent Arcadia).
The Real Thing tells a familiar tale (adults and infidelity, writers coping with the ever-changing world), but the rhythm is altered a bit, giving the work a contemporary feel no matter when it is set, since people still wrestle with these problems constantly. Henry (Stephen Dillane) is a playwright with an undercurrent of disdain for mediocrity, and he's not the greatest husband in the world when the play begins. Charlotte (Sarah Woodward) is his patient actress wife, who throws an impromptu lunch party together when couple Max (Nigel Lindsay) and Annie (Jennifer Ehle), also actors, arrive. But what Charlotte doesn't know is that Henry and Annie are already in love with each other, and Annie, the more aggressive of the two, opts to spill the beans while a bemused Henry wishes to keep it secretive. Their spouses do find out, and the bulk of the play centers around Henry and Annie and the consequences of their lustfulness, including her involvement in a lackluster play written by an ex-con she helped some time ago. The path is rocky as personalities collide.
Punctuated by pop tunes throughout that, to Henry's mind, are sublime because of their unpretentious nature, director David Leveaux has inventively staged the show (with designer Vicki Mortimer), with partitions moving side to side, up and down, left to right, much like the characters in the space. Their lives are a ride, only they don't seem to realize it. And it also a relatively spare production, letting the performers envelop the surroundings with full-bodied characterizations. The sublimely talented Ehle is ideal for Annie. Her resemblance to Meryl Streep is apparent not only in her features but in her acting, as she fearlessly crafts a woman whose desire leaps ahead of her heart. It is a tricky role to master, but Ehle miraculously gives us someone with real immediacy and understanding, even if Annie is the furthest thing to a heroine in the eyes of most people.
The real thing here, though, is Stephen Dillane. A thin actor with wiry hair but armed an arresting sense of timing, he fashions one of the most indelible cynics in recent years and manages to be charming, sexy, off-handed and heartbreaking all at the same time. It seems almost impossible to play an emotionally distant, rigid writer and make him sympathetic, but Dillane's majestic performance suggests great depths. There are many scenes, such as his discovery that Annie has lied to him about her travels, where he has to let us know what he's feeling without letting her know. A difficult task, but Dillane's lived-in, resourceful portrayal keeps us in the moment. Whether he's launching metaphors about bad writing or slumped in a chair with a telephone on his lap, Dillane is riveting, and with a simple turn of the head, can suggest the turning point of a scene in entirety. It's a blazing, highly original performance.
If there is a flaw to Real Thing, it's that the play still has scenes that don't really need to be there (such as a later scene involving Henry and Charlotte's sexually aware teenage daughter). We don't learn much about the peripheral characters that we couldn't have already guessed in such scenes, but we are thankful for their inclusion, as they give Dillane and Ehle an opportunity to continue creating fascinating adults. In fact, their work is so striking, and their scenes together so laced with sexual tension and stirring conviction, you almost wish no one else in the play existed. But, as everyone involved in this revival is so noteworthy, that would be rather silly.
