"There's something scary about stupidity made coherent," says Henry, hero of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, after one of his lover Annie's trendy-lefty effusions. There's something scarier about stupidity made a hit precisely because of its trendy-conservative effusions. If it weren't being praised without limit as a serious, indeed brilliant comedy by a writer who after years of cool and flashy wit finally has mastered character and feeling, The Real Thing's stupidity—that of a clever writer in the grip of commerce—could be dismissed with dispatch. The play is shallowly reactionary in its art and its politics, crudely subservient to a wealthy, aging audience, and self-pitying in its psychology—though funny, line by line, for those of us who are easy laughs. But when critics are urging their readers to see the play twice and are themselves going twice (e.g., John Simon), dismissiveness isn't enough: however false it may be, the thing is a cultural event.
Stoppard's comedy enmeshes a love-and-adultery-among-theater-folk story with an argument about literature and politics. It's so deeply enmeshed that the moment when working-class antinuclear politics, in the form of one Brodie, is thrown out of Henry and Annie's living room is the moment when true love is affirmed, and Annie, freed of her radical burden, truly becomes Henry's real thing and he hers….
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