On Stage

...At times we can't tell whether Henry is living with Charlotte or Annie, or both...

...The adulteress, while soon aware that she has lost the round, resists tenaciously and retreats only step by step, preparing for an exit that acknowledges no defeat and thus does not exclude maneuvering for future victory...

...Annie has a persona that seems more bizarre than alluring...

...The excellent performances turned in by all the actors cannot lift them out of the realm of stereotype or, in the case of Brodie, ludicrous caricature...

...To begin with, this requires full-fledged characters, and here at most two of seven people we meet on stage qualify...

...He has been waiting in an armchair with his back to the door, ready not to shoot or shout, but, in a figurative sense anyway, to slowly squeeze to death...

...Nichols' sparkling staging of the individual scenes cannot overcome this confusion...

...A wife comes home from an alleged business trip to Geneva, to be greeted by her husband with poised frigidity...

...Max, the deceived partner in House of Cards (theater), repeats his role in The Real Thing (life...

...Max, who played the husband, is their friend...

...As The Real Thing goes on, the approbation at the close of each scene thins out until the unanimous approval again at the very end, but any theater in the world would fight to get those first 20 minutes as a curtain raiser...

...The writer has been carefully drawn, with conflicting traits that could very well belong to the creator of a work like House of Cards, and Irons' finely graduated interpretation adds all the right nuances...

...The girl exits with a series of wisecracks that seem faithfully copied from Henry—making them good Stoppard but implausible Debbie...

...More than once, I heard spectators asking one another where the action was taking place...

...After introducing her as part of a quartet of principals, he has her reappear for a single scene in the second act...

...Even when she tells Henry, after their divorce, that she has had nine lovers, we can only surmise that she must have been a poor, sullen and passive mistress to all of them—assuming, for a moment that her claim is true...

...Having found the passport she foolishly left behind, he knows she has been neither to Switzerland nor to Amsterdam, her professed destination during an earlier brief absence...

...We learn in the scene immediately following that the marital confrontation actually was an excerpt from a play called House of Cards, authored by a playwright named Henry, portrayed by Jeremy Irons...

...In the same article, Marowitz quoted the playwright as rejecting the contention that Travesties was "only a frivolous comedy," and going on to declare: "I think to be amusing and entertaining about a serious subject is a reasonable objective...

...But being a fan of Tom Stoppard' s kind of genius, I had hoped for a bit more from The Real Thing...

...Knowing who he is, however, makes it difficult to tell what Henry sees in Annie...

...At Annie's insistence, Henry agrees to rework it, a concession that marks the beginning of his path to defeat...

...And his cry of "Please, please, please don't"—not part of Henry's, or Stoppard's, usual vocabulary—confirms that there is seriousness in The Real Thing...

...The cuckold, a sure winner in this particular battle, has mapped out a devilish progression of questions that relentlessly elicit the uncomfortable right answers...

...Moreover, he has always seemed to like what he writes as much as most spectators, if not all critics, do...

...Yes, the evening is nonetheless very enjoyable...

...And the statement may well be the leitmotif of Stoppard's The Real Thing, now firmly entrenched at Broadway's Plymouth Theater...

...Even when we understand that a given sequence is being played on the " real life" level, the shifting sexual arrangements can be difficult to follow...

...Ironically, too, the problem is exacerbated by Tony Walton's ingenious scenery...

...Finally, Henry collapses in front of his mistress as she is on her way to join another...

...Not being Pirandello, Stoppard does not look too deeply into Charlotte's possibly variable conception of the truth...

...Henry is never deprived of the language appropriate to a Tom Stoppard alter ego, and when Annie loses faith and begins to do unto him as she did unto Max, he for the most part maintains his stiff upper lip of "dignified cuckoldry...

...Indeed, he soon forgets about her completely...

...On a train ride, Annie meets a fiery, phony radical named Brodie (Vyto Ru-ginis) who gets six years in prison after he sets a fire at a military installation in order, evidently, to impress Annie...

...Brodie has written an awful play about what he sees as "real life" that, if produced, may get him released...

...Secondly, a certain steadiness of focus is necessary, and although The Real Thing is consistently entertaining, less than a third of it treats the matter that is supposed to be at hand...

...Nonetheless, he must have been nettled by the widespread accusations that he either refused altogether to involve himself with serious issues, or at best approached them with an inappropriate light-heartedness...

...The brainy and witty playwright, unaccustomed to handling characters not of his own fabrication, reciprocates in a definitely different fashion...

...When the curtain comes down, everybody in the house applauds...

...Brodie is freed...

...Charlotte, so independent and feisty as the wife in House of Cards, is a poor, sullen, passive spouse to a conventionally domineering Henry in The Real Thing...

...She is a woman fascinated by the adventure of loving, whether the object is a man or the ideas she associates with men...

...On Stage WHERE STOPPARD FAILS BY LEO SAUVAGE There is little doubt that Tom Stoppard has demonstrated a great talent, perhaps a kind of genius, for combining literary wit with theatrical brilliance...

...As for her sex appeal, Glenn Close, who handles the role, is a good actress, but to my admittedly subjective eye she looks like one of those British secretaries one could find some years ago in the executive offices of big corporations...

...The trouble is that Stoppard's trademark, the farcical style he seems unable to abandon, does not easily mesh with the essential elements of serious comedy...

...Indeed it is...

...The author seeks to examine what happens to the love that has developed between a man and a woman when it comes into conflict with their individual temperaments or with the collective impulsions of the circle they move in...

...Annie is now free to be heatedly in love with Henry...

...There is the obligatory transitional scene where Annie tells Max of her affair and announces she is leaving, and he breaks down in tearful yet not very heartbreaking despair...

...These women were not usually hired for their sensuality...

...But the story'spower is severely undermined by the nature of Annie's character and of the twists of plot Stoppard steers her through in his attempt to find a spur for the changes in Henry...

...Typical of such remarks was the comment about his Travesties in an article by Charles Marowitz, the American critic and director who in 1968 established the Open Space Theater on London's Euston Road...

...We see him alone in what, so far as we can tell, is Henry's flat, watching his play on television as adapted by Henry and performed by Annie and Billy...

...So we have the juxtaposition of theater and reality, and we can start wondering about which is the real thing...

...Still, Stoppard does let the author of House of Cards become aware that love can be more or less real, and more and more painful...

...Henry has been provided with the gifts and ideas of the real playwright, Stoppard, as well as a private life all his own...

...Max is married to Annie, another actress who, as we also are presently apprised, is Henry's mistress...

...Nor does Stoppard always help us distinguish between the basic play and the various plays within it...

...Stoppard, said Marowitz, was "more visibly a descendant of Barnum and Bailey than of Jung and Freud...

...Henry, who writes brilliantly about love and adultery for the stage, in reality finds it much easier to experience the latter than the former...

...What else...

...When Henry and Annie arrive, the ex-con reveals himself to be an insufferable lout, and he is thrown out after a literal pie-in-the-face scene that is plausible Annie but not very good Stoppard, Except for Henry and Annie, the characters seem to have been utterly neglected by the author...

...Her superficial political militancy, directed especially against military activities, gives the impression that to an extent she is an emancipated modern woman...

...Max is dismissed still more offhandedly...

...Unfortunately, that is not quite what they are...

...On the other hand, her whimsical enthusiasm, and her perhaps "charming," and certainly cliche, unpredictability and impulsiveness tend to transform her into a sort of updated symbol of l'eternel feminin...

...The unbelievably speedy changes he achieves do not adequately denote the differences between locations...

...Yet despite the widespread acclaim this new work has received, the old problems persist...

...His subsequent presence is reduced to a phone call informing Henry he is getting married—though not, it seems, to Charlotte...

...Charlotte, who played the wife in House of Cards, is Henry's wife...

...Charlotte rematerializes in Henry's apartment—whether as a resident or a guest is not quite clear—and the two of them watch their 17-year-old, mini-skirted, backpacking daughter Debbie (Cynthia Nixon) go off with a young man...

...All this emerges in 20 minutes of superb dialogue, masterfully shaped by the author and expertly delivered, in championship theatrical ping-pong, by Kenneth Welsh and Christine Baranski under the direction of Mike Nichols...

...Meanwhile, Annie sleeps with Billie (Peter Gallagher), a young actor who is her fellow cast member in a Glasgow production of 'TisPity She's a Whore...

...The disappointment is aggravated by the fact that Stoppard's first scene is a scintillating jewel...

...The serious subject to be amusingly explored, then, is the relationship between Henry and Annie, and the evolution of their individual truths...