Old Vic | ★★★★✩
Since his Holocaust play Leopoldstadt much of the talk surrounding Tom Stoppard – for many the greatest living playwright – has been about what might be described as his late-onset Jewishness. It was always known that the forebears of this quintessentially English writer were Czech and that he had a Jewish father, but not that he was Jewish on both sides, a situation described in Leopoldstadt as “the full calamity”.
However, this slick revival of his 1982 comedy is a reminder of why we care. It is the kind of work that might make other playwrights question whether they should close their laptops and be mediocre at something more useful. It combines comedy and cleverness in a way that would come across as intellectual showboating in the hands of lesser writers. And with Stoppard at the very top of his game, what writer isn’t lesser?
No, if there is showboating to be found in this revival where love abuts urbane sophistication it is in Max Webster’s slick production. A border of bright light hovers over the action (design Peter Mackintosh) and to emphasise the play’s playfulness, black-clad stagehands turn out to be choreographed performers who dance to the pop music playe playwright Henry. The work is not autobiographical. But life did imitate art when Stoppard and Felicity Kendal (another late-onset Jew) became a couple much like McArdle’s Henry and Bel Powley’s Annie, an actress.
The whole conceit of the play is artfully meta with Henry’s life largely populated by actors (played by Susan Wokoma, Jack Ambrose and Oliver Johnstone) who perform Henry’s plays are either hitched to each other or to Henry himself.
Love and its related lesser emotions are slightly embarrassing things. To have an affair is cliché. Abject misery after being left by the one you adore is “just not in very good taste”. The real thing defies literature, declares Henry with such authority we take it at face value until Stoppard subverts the notion by writing him the best speech about love you might ever hear.
To boot, the real thing can also be hard to spot here because some scenes exist in other plays being performed by this play’s actors.
McArdle is excellent as the intellectually present but emotionally distant playwright. However, as Annie whose command of the heart turns arrogant Henry into an emotional wreck, Powley is pitch perfect, delivering a performance that extinguishes nostalgia for Kendal’s original turn. Not that I saw it, but the idea of seeing the playwright’s lover playing this playwright’s lover is irresistible. All of which proves Powley is the real thing.
