THE REAL THING. To 3 December.

Tour.

THE REAL THING
by Tom Stoppard.

Tour to 3 December 2005.

Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 2.00pm Wed and 2.30pm Sat.
Post-show discussion 27 Oct.
Runs: 2hr 20min One interval.
Review: Alan Geary: 24 October 2005 at Nottingham Theatre Royal.

The best thing about this fine production is Tom Conti’s performance.
The most enjoyable thing about this production is Tom Conti’s performance as playwright Henry, which is saying a lot because director Tim Pigott-Smith gives us a fine interpretation of a cracking play.

It’s clear that Stoppard himself is speaking through Henry. All right, he uses all the characters to throw his ideas about, but Henry is his main mouthpiece. The apparent ease with which Conti combines his character’s charming absent-minded intellectualism with a facility for the penetrating insight borders on the miraculous. At times you almost fear that Conti has forgotten his lines, he handles the pauses and complexities of the text with such sensitivity.

It being Stoppard, it’s all alarmingly meta-theatrical; the first scene turns out to be part of a play within the play, and… but to say more in this direction would be to give too much of the game away. Henry’s dislike of new digital gadgetry – it’s 1983 – is reflected in the fact that more than once we’re made to think that some fool in the audience has left his mobile on.

Henry’s actress lover, Annie, (beautifully played by Nina Young) gets tangled up with an angry young Scottish proletarian in the peace movement who’s written a piece of agitprop; it’s a clumsy stinker. This, and the fact that she’s appearing in a Jacobean tragedy allows Stoppard, with some neat scene-changing, to hop in and out of reality, to draw a host of complex parallels and to talk at absorbing and amusing length about the playwright’s art. There’s a nice hint of menace in an argumentative scene with Annie when Henry produces a cricket bat; but he uses it to make an exquisite analogy about the distinction between good and bad play writing.

Henry loves cheap pop music. One of the best of many brilliantly funny lines is when he suggests that if Beethoven, like Buddy Holly, had been killed at twenty-two in an air crash the entire history of music would have been different - but so would the history of aviation.

You have to be on your metal with this one, particularly after the interval, but, as usual with Stoppard, the effort’s worth it.

Max: Malcolm Stoddard.
Charlotte: Elizabeth Payne.
Henry: Tom Conti.
Annie: Nina Young.
Billy: Tom Frederic.
Debbie: Annabel Scholey.
Brodie: Steven Cree.

Director: Tim Pigott-Smith.
Designer: Bob Bailey.
Lighting: Leonard Tucker.
Music Supervisor: Jonathan Goldstein.

2005-10-25 11:44:19