20th Century English Literature

The Real Thing

Summary

Characters and Relationship

Play within a play

Metatheatre

Theme

Cricket Bat vs. Cudgel

The Real Thing : A Glossary of Terms

The Real Thing：play-within-the play

Summary

Stoppard opens The Real Thing with a play within the play, a technique favored by Shakespeare. The play opens with an architect, Max, discovering that his wife, Charlotte, has been unfaithful to him. The first scene is not the real thing at all but a scene from Henry’s play. The second scene introduces Henry, a rumpled, middle-aged playwright starting to venture into television. Although very talented and quite successful, he seems to be at a loss when writing about love, partially because he is unable to feel it himself. Henry is the typical intellectual playwright. He can talk all about love, but never in any real sense. When the play begins, Henry is married to an actress, Charlotte.

She is an actress playing Max’s wife in Henry’s newest play about “infidelity among the architect class”. In Fact, Henry is having affair with Annie, an actress who is married to Max, an actor appearing in Henry's current play. When traveling to London, Annie meets Brodie who has been jailed for desecrating the Cenotaph.

Annie is trying to interest Henry in a play written by Brodie and asks Henry to fix up Brodie’s play. On the train to Glasgow, Annie flirts with Billy, a young actor performing with her in Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Billy also thinks Brodie's play is rubbish, but wants to do it in order to be with Annie. Henry and Debbie discuss first love and marital fidelity.

After she leaves, Charlotte and Henry reminisce about their marriage, and Henry learns that Charlotte had nine affairs during their time together. In the final scene, Brodie now is free from prison and watches a videotape of the teleplay Henry adapted from his original script. He insults Henry for being "clever" with his play. The play ends with Henry receiving a call from Max. He is getting re-married, and Henry offers his congratulations, saying, "I'm delighted, Max. Isn't love wonderful?"

Characters and Relationship

Henry
a. He is a playwright– a playwright with a reputation for being witty,
clever and intellectual.
b. He has an affair with with the actress, Annie, during his marriage
with Charlotte.
c. He does not realize the true nature of love and he has the problem of expressing love through his writing. (p. 40, the fifth dialogue from the bottom.)

Charlotte
a. She is an actress who is also Henry’s wife.
b. She later divorces with Henry . She admits that she also has nine affairs during their marriages.
c. She feels like a victim under Henry’s domineering attitude. (p. 21, first line: I am the victim of Henry’s fantasy…)
d. She acts and performs no matter on the stage or off the stage. (P.21, the third dialogue from the bottom.)

Debbie
a. The precocious and rebellious teenage daughter of Henry and Charlotte.
b. She holds a different view toward love. She thinks that love has nothing to do with sexual
fidelity. If sex is mere biology, relationships need make no pretense of even aspiring to fidelity. (p. 62: the last dialogue from the bottom and….; p 64: the fifth dialogue from the top.)

Annie
a. She is also an actress and an activist in social causes.
b. She dares to speak and act directly.
c. She boldly expresses her own true feeling. (p.27) (p.43: the middle part)
d. She later marries to Henry, yet she still involves with another man, Billy.
e. Comparing to Henry, she has better realization toward the love.

Max
a. An actor; He plays Charlotte’s husband in Henry’s “House of Cards”.
b. He discovers his wife’s infidelity through an incriminatingly dropped handkerchief

Brodie
a. A soldier who supports anti-missiles demonstration, just like Annie.
b. Brodie made his protest to ingratiate himself with Annie; Annie supports him because she feels guilty; Henry helps them by rewriting his script because he loves Annie.

Billy
An actor who has a crush on Annie. They flirt with each other on their way to
Glasgow. Annie and Henry’s relationship will be tested due to his presence.

Play within a play

Performance that characters on stage puts on for other characters. One value of the device lies in its blurring of the division between actors and audience. If actors sit down on stage to watch other actors, they become an extension of the audience and it is no longer clear that they are part of the fictional world. In addition, these spectators within the play can present the theatre audience with a mirror image that it may or may not recognize.
The device also draws audience into the play creating various level of reality.
The device of a play within a play in The Real Thing shows us art imitating and thus twinning life since the plot will later turn and turn again on adultery, and will then reverse itself as life imitates art, when Henry the playwright plays the role he written for the jealous husband in his own play. We see “House of Cards” double the plot of The Real Thing.

Metatheatre

Metatheatre is a convenient name for the quality or force in play which challenges theatre’s claim to be simply realistic– to be nothing but a mirror in which we view the actions and sufferings of characters like ourselves, suspending our disbelief in their reality. It may-- by the device of like plays within plays, self-consciously “theatrical” characters– dwell on the boundaries between “illusion” or artifice and reality within a play, making us speculate on the complex mixture of illusion and reality in our ordinary experience.

Theme
Is it possible to find a language to express love??
—the Initiation of Henry

In The Real Thing, Stoppard attempts to deal with what is real in life, what is real in art, and what the real differences are between art and life. The subject of love (reality) fuses with the subject of art (imaginative reality). The play is about Henry’s education in love—begun earlier by Charlotte, continued by Debbie, and is completed by Annie.

In the previous scene, when Charlotte reveals to Henry that she had nine affairs while they were married, he says he is, “Surprised. I thought we’d made a commitment.” Charlotte answers: “There are no commitments, only bargains….Were are an idiot” (65). Charlotte’s reply suggests how subjective interpretations can differ and cause misperceptions and a breakdown in understanding and communication. Henry’s idiocy may be in the past for Charlotte, but he does not begin to change until he is confronted with objective reality of Annie’s infidelity.

Later, when the fiction of “House of Cards” becomes a painful reality for Henry in The Real Thing, he insists on knowing whether Annie and Billy are lovers. “Henry: I need it….I care. Tell me” (71). This is a totally reverse attitude from Charlotte to Annie. Henry’s experience of “pain” as he tries to adjust to new perceptions of himself and of Annie leads us through the journey of his self-revelation. Not surprisingly, he discovers it is much more difficult to play the role of “dignified cuckoldry” (76) than it was to write it for “Max” in “House of Cards.”

At Scene Seven, Henry has a fatherly chat with his precocious daughter, Debbie. Sexually liberated at seventeen, she confides to him her initial and subsequent affairs, just as Charlotte had done earlier. Indeed, Debbie reminds Henry of Annie as she (Debbie) defines free love as being free of propaganda—That’s what free love is free of—propaganda (63).

In the important discussion that follows, we can tell Henry is unable to ‘write love’—“Yes. Well, I remember…” (63). As Henry ruminates the nature of love, he comments about the aftermath, the pain that is left when it is gone. “It’s to do with knowing and being known. … It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face” (63). Debbie perceptively picks up the subtext in his comments. “Annie got someone else, then?” (64) she asks. She admonishes Henry: “Don’t you. Exclusive rights isn’t love, it’s colonization” (64). This scene with his daughter contains the hard truth that Henry’s emotional education must include.

By the end of the play, we sense that Annie and Henry have gained this “knowledge;” they have come to accept what the other is really like, to understand what he or she really means. The real thing, Henry learns, is that with the often contradictory joys and pains of marital relationships, it is only by understanding and respecting Annie’s needs that he can hold on. The growth of a love that is real: not perfect, but fallible, painful, and thus, recognizably human.

The understanding affects even the dramatist’s art as expressed in his comment that he can finally ‘write love’—You should have told me. That one I would have known how to write (82).

In this play, Stoppard has worked to create and convey a relationship that is not part of a fairy tale but “the real thing”: a real love that may not perfect. And it is quite “all right” for us to believe in as well. In an interview with Vogue, given when The Real Thing opened on Broadway, Stoppard indicates that he wanted to dramatize a ‘real’ relationship. “There’s always a precipice, but some couples know it’s there. It’s just what keeps them together is stronger than what tends to separate them.” And what keeps them together?
“Love. They’re right for each other. They love each other.” (Joan Juliet Buck, Vogue,
March 1984, 514)

Cricket Bat vs. Cudgel

The Real Thing’s affirmation of art is rooted
in a celebration of language. As Henry said
“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are.
They deserve respect” (54). The Real Thing
celebrates the sacredness of words which can
grant a form of immortality. “If you get the right
ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little
or make a poem which children will speak for you when
you’re dead” (54). The adherence of the usage of language makes Henry insist not to rewrite Brodie’s play even though Annie is really mad about this.

Arguing that “there’s something scary about stupidity made coherent” (51), Henry picks up a cricket bat to demonstrate his theory of writing. “This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, … , like a dance floor. … It’s better because it’s better” (52). Henry’s explanation of the intricate composition of the cricket bat (metaphorically ‘well chosen words nicely put together’) mirrors the turgid prose of Brodie’s dialogue is a cudgel (a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat).

For Henry, style is all, and whether or not a play “will travel” depends on style, not message, particularly the kind of revolutionary message Brodie’s plays contain. The difference between Henry’s dramatic “cricket bat” and Brodie’s “lump of wood” is a sharp one. The difference between writing well and writing rubbish, springs not from the social or political importance of the subject but from the liveliness or loutishness in the use of language, the carelessness or precision in putting words together. The writer can
‘get it right’ or can fail to get it right. And the difference between the two is as great
as the difference between a cricket bat and a cudgel.

The Real Thing : A Glossary of Terms

•House of Cards - the name of Henry's play that was performed by Charlotte and Max (scene one)
•Buck's fizz - a drink made with orange juice and champagne. (p.19 eight dialogues from
the bottom & p.24 in the middle / Henry’s dialogue)
•Desert Island Discs - a BBC radio show. Desert Island Discs was created by Roy
Plomley in 1942 and since then has cast away hundreds of
celebrities, from stars of stage and screen to eminent politicians.
Initially guestswere only allowed to take eight records with them
to the mythical island. Then after about a hundred programs Roy
Plomley also allowed his 'castaways' to pack a luxury - provided it
was "an inanimate object purely for the senses which is not going
to help you to live". A few years later, guests were also allowed to
choose a book, in addition to The Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Roy Plomley died in 1985 and Michael Parkinson presented about 90 programs between 1986 and 1988. Sue Lawley has presented the program since then. Therefore, in The Real Thing, it is known that Henry is looking for the eight records “you associate with turning-points in your life.” (p.17 in the middle / Henry’s dialogue) and he selects James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as his favorite book (p.16 ; five dialogues from the bottom).
Besides, he wants Annie to be his luxury. (p .19 ; seven
dialogues from the bottom & p.24 ; in the middle / Henry’s
dialogue & p.36 ; two dialogues from the top)

•Twiglet - dry biscuit, similar to a pretzel stick. (p.23 ; eight & eleven dialogues from the
top)

•Miss Julie - a play by August Strindberg, Annie and Henry read the parts of Miss Julie
and Jean. (pp. 39-40)

•Mog – a type of sleeping pill. (p. 39 ; twelve dialogues from the top)

•Three Sisters - written by Russian playwright Anton Chekov who is famous for his
another play The Cherry Orchard in western literature. The play is set in a time of transition in Russia from traditional rural life to the luring excitement of the big city. With their father's death, three sisters feel trapped in their provincial military outpost. In this compelling story of their desire for change and fulfillment, the sisters' love for each other gives them the strength to hope. (p. 47 ; in the middle / Annie’s dialogue)

•'Tis Pity She's a Whore - a play by John Ford, Annie and Billy play the parts of Annabella
and Giovanni. (pp 48–49 ; Henry’s long dialogue & p.55 ;
two dialogues from the top & pp 58–59 nine dialogues from
the bottom ; scene eight - rehearsal)

The Real Thing：play-within-the play

Henry Ibsen's House of Cards

A man confronts his wife after discovering that she has been unfaithful to him and the scene merely turns out to be one of Henry’s plays titled House of Cards known in scene two of The Real Thing. In this episode, Henry is inquiring about the play’s popularity and the play’s title is first introduced by Charlotte. (p. 20 ; three dialogues from the bottom) However, Charlotte, who played the wife in scene one, is in fact married to Henry, the playwright. Max, who played the husband, is in fact a friend of theirs, and married to Annie, another actress.