The Lantern Theater presents Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing

Stoppard made much ado about “the real” in the theater and love, marriage, politics, ideology, science, and history, including events like the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. Hints of his future work abound in The Real Thing (1982), which entwines themes of love, art, commitment, and self-knowledge amidst generational and political changes. (Program notes by dramaturg Meghan Winch address these issues in England during the period.)

Complicated London lives

The play opens in London with a confrontation between Max (Adam Howard), a philosophically minded playwright, and his wife Charlotte (Brett Ashley Robinson). After a business trip, Charlotte makes a devastating revelation of infidelity, and leaves. In the next scene, two years later, Max and Charlotte reunite—though Charlotte is married to a playwright named Henry, and Max is married to a 25-year-old actor and activist named Annie (Campbell O’Hare).

Though momentarily confusing, it becomes apparent that the first scene was from a play written by Henry (J Hernandez), who is not like “Max,” the character he created who shares the “real” Max’s name (Howard plays both versions of Max). Nor is Charlotte like the fictional woman Henry wrote. The “real” Henry loves Annie, who feels the same, and Max and Charlotte likewise pair up. This sets in motion the play-within-a-play gambit, which Stoppard employs in nearly all of his work.

As the play unfolds, Annie and Henry talk, touch, read scripts, and grow closer and apart as lovers and partners. Henry writes unhappily for TV, unable to write about his love for Annie despite being a hopeless romantic. Annie explains that actors express what is “real” through their bodies. Hernandez and O’Hare are terrific, better than rom-com lovers. Annie supports a young Scot named Brodie (Howard again) in prison for a military protest, who is an aspiring playwright himself. This engenders more conflict as Annie begs a reluctant Henry’s help on Brodie’s play, and more infidelity is eventually revealed.

Meanwhile, Debbie (Cheyenne Parks), Henry and Charlotte’s 17-year-old daughter, decides to leave home with her boyfriend. Parks captures Debbie’s spunky declaration of youthful freedom. In brief, keenly acted scenes the smart, aggressive characters fuel the play’s energy and expose other attitudes and desires when it comes to being real and doing one’s own thing.

Seamlessly woven Stoppard

The play takes place in a sparse, bland, modernist living room with a writing desk and cabinet-style console record player (set by James F. Pyne). The absence of decoration underscores Henry’s austere intellectual disposition and indirectly mocks theatricality that relys on showy effects. As Henry is a fan of pop music, The Monkees, The Crystals (“Da Doo Ron Ron”), and others intermittently play as a soundtrack. Fittingly, all the characters wear everyday clothes, with the women more stylishly dressed (costumes by Kelly Myers).

In other words, from the mise en scène to the television-like sit-com staging, The Real Thing is squarely about talking and humans’ dependence on language to deal with real things like love and emotions, even in something as self-consciously representational as the theater. Seasoned director Peter DeLaurier helms a smooth production well-tuned to Stoppard’s ideas and the joys of a play being played. And spoken. Stoppard’s themes emerge through seamlessly woven, mature, intelligent, quite British speech at its most, umm, convincing pitch. The cast sustains the pace and rhythm of his complex utterances and sharp, analytical dialogue.

The plot may sound complicated, but it’s not difficult to follow onstage. Stoppard is masterful and this production, to alter Hamlet’s line, demonstrates that “the play’s the thing wherein to play with what is real.” Or something like that.