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.
Henry’s angry teenage daughter asks him about the various manifestations of romantic love and he praises ‘exclusive’ relationships. His daughter denounces these as ‘colonisation’. A thoroughly contemporary view. Henry responds wearily to her banal thought processes: ‘It’s like Michelangelo working in polystyrene.’ Not a bad summary of modern debates on social media.
The cast are all right but not top-notch. The best is Bel Powley whose nomadic sexual journey forms the spine of the story. Oliver Johnstone is a brilliant Stoppardian actor but his character fades too early from the script. This dazzlingly funny play is not revived as frequently as it deserves to be. Don’t expect perfection. Don’t expect the audience to be fully absorbed. Don’t worry if the actors can’t pronounce every word correctly. Henry offers this description of a political drama written by a talentless Marxist hothead. ‘It’s half as long as Das Kapital and only twice as funny.’ You may be the only one who enjoys the joke. Never mind. At least you were there.
Bitter Lemons is a pair of monologues performed side by side. Two women, AJ and Angelina, tell their stories in parallel at adjoining microphones. They have several things in common. Their mothers were doting, loving angels and their fathers were cheats. Both are unmarried and desperate to succeed in male-dominated professions.
The story gets started when each discovers that she’s pregnant and decides to have an abortion. ‘It’s a bit of white fluff,’ says AJ, who wants to become a professional footballer. Angelina works as a financial analyst and the pregnancy severely affects her performance at work. She’s already struggling because the City’s ‘diversity’ culture makes her paranoid – and when she sees her image on the company website, she wonders if she was hired to fill a quota.
Her worst problem is a boorish colleague, Gary, who treats her like a servant. He asks nosy questions about her ancestry and says, ‘you don’t look mixed-race to me’. Each morning he sends her out to fetch his coffee and she meekly obeys. And he has a habit of interrupting her in meetings and snapping his fingers at her. These details sound odd. Why doesn’t she record Gary’s conduct in secret and sue the firm for millions?
The script goes into a lot of harrowing detail about the development of embryos in the womb and it dramatises the moment the abortion drugs kick in during a football match AJ is playing in. She refuses to reveal her condition to her colleagues in case the coach, a man, drops her from the team.
AJ is certainly in a tricky spot but her woes are self-inflicted. She became pregnant after a one-night stand with a barman who declined to wear a condom and she accepted his refusal. Neither AJ or Angelina considers sparing their child’s life and raising it normally. The moral of the show is clear. Slaying a baby is wiser than caring for it, especially if the abortion enables a woman to purse her true ambition – emulating men. What a perverse homily.
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