The Real Thing Mystifies Our Man in London

What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is the point of two hands clapping for something you don't like? Why do we clap loudly even if we don't understand?

I had a headache at the end of the new revival of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing. This was nothing to do with the production. Director David Leveaux's handsome work transfers to Broadway from London's West End and will do tremendous business, whether or not I understand it.

My headache stems from the language itself. Stoppard is just so damn clever. Everything is art and life and semantics and pyrotechnic wordplay. Not much feeling. I had to stifle the urge to shout out to the performers, "Hey, could you just do that scene over again, I don't get how it all relates!" The Real Thing opens with a man building a house of cards. His wife comes home from a business trip and he accuses her of cheating on him. In the next scene we discover that the previous scene is really just a scene from a play within The Real Thing.

It was written by Henry, a successful playwright, and starred Henry's wife Charlotte and friend Max. Max is married to an actress named Alice. Alice declares her love to Henry and both marriages capitulate. For the next couple of hours, Stoppard contorts the "reality" with the play that Henry as written. On top of which, Alice becomes committed to a piece of political theater that ends up nearly destroying her marriage to Henry. Stoppard also shows us scenes from this. The play within a play within a play resonates off itself like the mirrors in a barbershop.

Stoppard's first language was not English. He was born in Czechoslovakia, and moved to England when he was a child. This is a point that lingers with me whenever I see one of his plays. Beating the language at its own game is what Stoppard has always been about. He creates a beautiful gloss of glassy wordplay that sometimes begins to examine the human heart but never probes very far. Maybe he doesn't want to.

The English theater critic Kenneth Tynan once made the distinction between the "hairy" playwright and the "smooth" playwright. A hairy playwright was someone who took on tough issues, used hard language and drop-kicked social issues. Tom Stoppard conversely is the epitome of a smooth playwright: cool, witty and clean.

I left the theater feeling extremely intellectually inadequate. Good grief, I couldn't understand all of Tom Stoppard's scintillating treatise on life and art known as The Real Thing! I was losing hipness credits at a blinding speed. If I kept up this level of obtuseness, I might just have to dispense with my Malcolm X glasses, the big cuffs in my jeans and my sideburns-not to mention my newly-acquired ribbed turtleneck with a collar. I would surely have to kiss the espresso drinks goodbye. Tom Stoppard is the cappuccino of contemporary British theater and he leaves me feeling I'm not even astute enough for Sanka.

Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square lay ahead of me, yet I still did not have The Real Thing fully in my grasp as I left the Albery Theater. What is The Real Thing? What does coffee taste like without foam on top? Can a body be warm without its pea coat?

My walk home takes me through an underground breezeway at the crossroad of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. This traffic intersection is one of the busiest and most dangerous in the city. The halogen lamps are bright and everything looks flat. Fellow theatergoers walk past quickly; some with The Real Thing programs tucked into their jacket pockets. Out of the corner of my eye I see two street kids squatting by the side of the concrete wall. They laugh together in earnest warmth. They are shooting up, with needles stuck in their arms. My eyes grow wide. I have never seen this before. The two street kids laugh and laugh, hugging each other in tender ecstasy as the taxis race by.

I clapped long and hard for a play I didn't understand. Here were two kids committing an act that terrified me yet they were genuine and full of emotion, far from the two hours I had just spent in Stoppard's artificial world. Was this the real thing? The street kids stare at each other in happy wonder, huddled close, clapping their hands together.