Review: The Real Thing - The Jewish Chronicle

If there is an Achilles heel in Kevin Spacey's now undoubtedly successful reign at the Old Vic, it is new British writing.

And that is not because it has not been any good, but because there has not been any at all. Conspicuous in recent Old Vic programmes is a picture of the most thrilling production I have seen at this or any other theatre. It came courtesy not of a home-grown play, but of David Mamet, with Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in full flow in the very American Speed the Plow.

Tom Stoppard is the only English-language playwright alive who can match Mamet for vaulting dialogue that leaves your head spinning with the wit of it all, and which, just when you think that the playwright's cleverness is the point, leaves you a little bit devastated by its humanity.

So it is with Stoppard's The Real Thing, a 1982 drama which followed Harold Pinter's Betrayal by four years. The two plays have much in common. Both are semi-autobiographical, each deal with the disintegration of trust in friendship and in marriage - and Toby Stephens, who in 2007 played Pinter's literary agent Jerry is now playing Stoppard's playwright Henry.

He is the author of a play in which a husband discovers that his wife is having an affair. We discover that a similar thing is happening in his own life, except that, in the real thing, the betrayer is not Henry's wife, Charlotte (Fenella Woolgar), but husband Henry himself, who is conducting an illicit relationship with Anne (Hattie Morahan), the wife of a friend.

Like Pinter's Jerry, Stoppard's Henry is the epitome of English witty reserve. Not much gets through that carapace of emotional detachment that protects them from the kind of love that hurts, but also hurts those they love. Pain is dealt with a wry curl of the lip, at least it is in Stephens's portrayals of the two characters.

But whereas Pinter reveals the cynicism that lies beneath sophisticated urbanity, Stoppard reveals the innocence. With any lesser writer the result would probably be embarrassing sentimentality.

That is not to say Henry is not capable of dishing out the most withering of insults. When, two years into the relationship that started as an affair, actress Anne explains the cause closest to her heart - a soldier convict whose bad playwriting she is resolved to support - Henry swats away Anne's heartfelt speech with the breathtaking line: "There is something scary about stupidity made coherent".

Yet this detached, icy figure turns out to be the most romantic of them all. That is, if romance means loyalty.

When Anne takes a lover, Henry falls apart. But only for a while, choosing dignified cuckoldry - "a difficult line to tread" - over the pleading "love-me-because-I'm-in-pain" option.

Against these events Anna Mackmin's production deftly deploys pop music as a revealing soundtrack to the heart, most effectively when Henry's carapace cracks to the strains of The Monkees' song, I'm a Believer.

Stephens is a master at revealing the vulnerability of the imperious and seemingly impervious. There is terrific support from Woolgar as his acerbic and increasingly lonely first wife Charlotte, and an equally terrific debut from Louise Calf as Henry's 17-year-old daughter - a brilliant portrait of a naive but fiercely intelligent adolescent.

Less engaging is Stephens's co-star Morahan, who is much the same at the end of the play as she is at the beginning - rather shrill.

Lez Brotherston's design sets the action within a giant silver picture frame, which might fancifully suggest the nature of love - lost forever when its gone, yet painfully captured by photographic memory - but you have to work at it.

But that is the thing with Stoppard - working at it is half the point. (Tel: 0844 871 7628)