The Real Thing review: Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play is the writer at his most brilliant and infuriating

James McArdle and Bel Powley star in the Old Vic’s revival of Stoppard’s tricksy, self-parodical play, but it feels dated to watch middle class couples being beastly to each other in beige living rooms

James McArdle (Henry) and Bel Powley (Annie) in ‘The Real Thing' at The Old Vic (Manuel Harlan)

Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play The Real Thing begins with exactly the kind of scene that makes theatre fans love or loathe this garlanded elder statesman of British theatre. A married couple are arguing. So naturally, there’s an Ibsen-esque door slam that topples a house of cards, an erudite but deeply dated discourse on the fundamental naffness of Japanese digital watches, and an atmosphere so arch it could be used to patch up the Colosseum. But soon, we’re shown this is all a tricksy bit of self-parody, part of Stoppard’s exploration of playwriting and the realities we construct around ourselves.

James McArdle is fantastically eloquent in the central role of Henry, a very Stoppard-like playwright who spends a lot of this play’s span prodding at questions of truth, deception, meaning and wordsmithery. None of the other characters come close to matching his rhetorical flights of fancy. But then again, they’re not really trying to. Susan Wokoma is all fury as his long-suffering actress wife Charlotte, constantly snared by his sharp verbal traps. And his naive lover Annie (Bel Powley) enjoys puncturing his discourses on writing: “What’s so good about putting words together?” she asks, championing activist playwright Brodie (Jack Ambrose) and his crusading but terrible works.

The Real Thing feels like Stoppard settling a score. He wrote it in the fiercely polarised political atmosphere of the early 1980s, when the rest of the theatre scene was vigorously mobilising against Thatcher – leaving him on the sidelines, a centrist advocating subtler forms of conveying a message, using words as precise as Swiss watches and artfully-tooled cricket bats. The Real Thing does indeed showcase Stoppard’s verbal powers. But its lefties Brodie and Annie are fundamentally unsatisfying opponents to Henry – crude and thuggish straw men dragged into the drawing room for a thorough dissection and autopsy.

That sense isn’t helped by Max Webster’s somewhat stodgy production, with its declamatory acting styles and chemistry-free, mismatched central couples. There’s an attempt to inject a bit of (appropriately metatheatrical) fun into the scene changes, with stagehands who bop to Motown songs or disrupt speeches with noisy vacuum cleaners. But it feels a bit timid – a reminder of other, livelier examples of the play-within-a-play genre, like Noises Off. Stoppard feels too strongly about theatre to ever fully cut loose.

Still, there are moments of pure fun. When Henry snobbishly reads out his rival Brodie’s play, Glasgow-born McArdle breaks out into a travesty of a Scottish accent, lurid as Irn Bru. And it’s quite satisfying to see put-upon Annie eventually hurl a bowl of gloopy dip across the living room, even if it arguably hits the wrong target.

James McArdle (Henry) and Susan Wokoma (Charlotte) in ‘The Real Thing’ at The Old Vic (Manuel Harlan)

Stoppard’s 2020 play Leopoldstadt had a seriousness that chimed with theatre’s current mood, and in interviews that preceded it, he talked about how excavating his family’s painful history made him grateful to have escaped life under communism. The Real Thing offers a less deeply felt, more snobbish perspective on the ills of the left – and there’s something resolutely unfashionable about its spectacle of adulterous middle-class couples being beastly to each other in beige living rooms. It’s Stoppard being his most brilliant, most infuriating self – and it won’t win any of his detractors round to his cause.

Old Vic, until 26 October; oldvictheatre.com