SOURCE: "Cricket Bats and Commitment: The Real Thing in Art and Life," in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 45-60.

In the essay below, Delaney explores the intersection of life and art, genuine and ersatz love, in The Real Thing.

That Tom Stoppard's plays are neither imprecise nor obscurantist, that his ambiguities are intended neither to dazzle nor confuse but 'to be precise over a greater range of events', was perhaps the most signal contribution of Clive James's [November] 1975 Encounter article: 'It is the plurality of contexts that concerns Stoppard: ambiguities are just places where contexts join'. And in The Real Thing (1982) the interstices come between art and life. Stoppard's attempt, a breathtakingly ambitious one, is to deal at once with what is real in life, what is real in art, and what the real differences are between art and life. The Real Thing endeavours to indicate what...