TOM STOPPARD IS THE SIMONE BILES of playwrights: the star performer who has brought more exhilarating twists, puns and dimensions to stage language than any writer since Harold Pinter.
Of his works, The Real Thing is the most complex and twisty in word and deed. Some mental orienteering is required from the audience from the first scene onwards to get a handle on the complex factual and fictional intellectuals in the early 1980s and the multi-layered entanglements of the core quartet.
The Old Vic’s revival under Max Webster’s direction comes more than 40 years after middle-England’s heartthrob Felicity Kendal first starred as the siren Annie, whose serial infidelities obsess her anguished writer husband, Henry
A host of stage luminaries have since channelled Stoppard’s witty, gritty explorations of the fragility of…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2024