Tom Stoppard's work has been notably generous with many commodities, from verbal wit to metaphysical ennui, but with one it's always been notably stingy. Bluntly, his characters have lacked strong personal feelings. A sort of rueful tristesse has, on the whole, been their dark night of the soul. It was in that mood that both the philosopher-hero of Jumpers contemplated the disloyalties of a wife he was supposed to love and, rather earlier, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern shrugged and joked their way to their violent deaths. Something deeper was perhaps touched in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Stoppard's tale of a father and son separated by KGB malice; but only a bit, and briefly. You can't conceive of his people in any sort of ecstasy, whether of pleasure or pain. You can't imagine them exulting or howling or even hurting very much.
Or couldn't until The Real Thing, a play in which Stoppard put his talent on the couch and subjects it to some courageous scrutiny. This begins as if nothing has changed. A husband urbanely quizzes his wife about her professed trip abroad. Franc doing well? Frank who? The Swiss franc. After a bit more verbal virtuosity he reveals that she left her passport at home, and the curtain falls on her mild dismay, his suave amusement at this proof of her adultery. It is an amusing piece of self-parody on Stoppard's part, and it is promptly rejected with something akin to self-disgust. What we've been watching, it seems, is a scene by a dramatist noted, like Stoppard, for his wit, sophistication, intelligence, and general lack of commitment, either political or emotional. His life, into which we're plunged for the rest of the evening, turns out to be considerably less bland and brittle than his art.
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