Conclusion

Abstract

No more than an interim assessment can be made of a writer in his mid-forties who is still writing fairly prolifically and whose work covers such a diverse range. As if to emphasise both these facts, Tom Stoppard produced two very different new plays at the end of 1982. The Real Thing opened at the Strand Theatre on 16 November, in a production again directed by Peter Wood which starred Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal.¹ Dedicated by Stoppard to his wife Miriam, and easily his most personal play to date, it tackles a subject from which in the past he has notoriously shied away, namely love. Taking as his two central characters, Henry, a drily unemotional and at least semi-autobiographical playwright, and Annie, an actress, he enquires whether love and marriage can ever be truly compatible, and after conducting us through their initial affair (while each is married to someone else), their marriage and their subsequent love entanglements, finally answers his question in the affirmative. Writing in Punch, Sheridan Morley averred that

When they come to write the textbooks on Tom Stoppard, if they haven’t already started, this is the play that’s going to give them the most trouble since it fits almost no preconceived notion of the kind of playwright he is thought to be.²