Dazzling: Stoppard's The Real Thing, at the Old Vic, reviewed

The Real Thing at the Old Vic is a puzzling beast. And well worth seeing. Director Max Webster sets the action in a vast sitting room painted electric blue with a white sofa in the centre. A lovely use of empty space. But the preview trailer on the theatre’s website shows the actors seated in a scruffy bomb site where they discuss similarities between Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play and the lyrics of Taylor Swift. Perhaps the Old Vic hopes to attract a younger audience, but this show will appeal most to Stoppard’s lifelong fans.

The play marks a major shift in his development. The exuberant and frothy cleverness of his earlier work has acquired emotional weight and a tougher outer shell. There’s a lot of jealousy and anger smouldering beneath the surface. The opening scene is a marvel of delayed comedy. A husband greets his wife after her return from a business trip to Switzerland. He knows that she’s lying, but she doesn’t know that he knows. The audience realises that something is up because the husband’s insistent and increasingly bellicose questions don’t match the banal circumstances of the reunion. And the encounter concludes on a bombshell line: ‘You forgot your passport.’

The scene is an elaborate in-joke that reworks the famous ‘Torcello’ encounter from Betrayal by Harold Pinter, which premièred in 1978. Stoppard offered this hat-tip to Pinter as a way of assuring playgoers that he shared their outlook and their theatrical tastes. Younger audiences may not grasp any of that. And they may not enjoy seeing their contemporaries mocked by Henry, the lead character, who writes scripts for a living and specialises in aphorisms. ‘What free love is free of is love,’ he says.