The Real Thing is Tom Stoppard’s most personal play. While disavowing its literal truth, the playwright allows, “I don’t know if it’s autobiographical, but it’s certainly a lot of auto-something.” Similarities abound between Stoppard and his protagonist Henry: both are celebrated, middle-aged playwrights renowned for their dramatizations of intellect over emotion; both are fierce defenders of eloquence and language; and both love pop music, in all its seeming triviality.
Stoppard allows these comparisons with certain caveats: “Because The Real Thing has an English playwright editorializing about writing and love and marriage and all that, it was perfectly obvious that when he was waving his prejudices around, he was pretty much speaking for me. But then so are the people [in the play] who contradict him. That’s what playmaking is; you have to take everybody’s side.”
Where previously Stoppard’s work investigated multiple perspectives on a subject through formal inventiveness, The Real Thing marked his first foray into realism. Where Stoppard’s earlier plays tackled such cerebral topics as metaphysics and existentialism, The Real Thing applies his signature linguistic rigor and structural dexterity to the wily subject of love.
Stoppard greets this challenge with typical droll self-awareness; Henry remarks, while in the throes of writer’s block, “Loving and being loved is unliterary.” But where Henry struggles to dramatize love in all its complexities, Stoppard thrives, manipulating our perception of reality and blurring the lines between conviction and convenience, artifice and truth, to illustrate love’s inherent mix of agony, joy, confusion, and exhilaration.
—Lauren Halvorsen