Centerstage - Chicago's Original City Guide

Court Theatre - http://www.uchicago.edu/aff/court_theatre Tickets: (773) 753-4472 Through December 12

Tom Stoppard has long been a major force in the theatre, and has scored on film in a big way with his Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. Now, many years after it's initial premiere, his 1982 play The Real Thing is perhaps as timely as ever.

Stoppard's work has always had a sense of life imitating art. He beautifully interweaves other dramatic works into his own plays to illustrate his point. His first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, showed the other side of Hamlet as seen through the eyes of two minor Shakespearean characters. He has done the same with his plays The Real Inspector Hound and Travesties with great success. In The Real Thing, Stoppard uses elements of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Miss Julie as well as a play written by his main character to make his points.

The semi-autobiographical The Real Thing, while not Stoppard's best known work, is a sensitive and tumultuous play about love and relationships. The story revolves around Henry (Edmund Davys), a 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, he can talk all about love, but never in any real sense. When the play begins, Henry is married to an actress, Charlotte (Barbara Robertson). We quickly discover that Henry is having affair with Annie (Kate Collins), an actress who is married to Max (Ned Schmidtke), an actor appearing in Henry's current play. As two marriages end and another begin, we begin to see that Henry is incapable of little more than jealousy, and that the terms he lives his life on are about to change. The Real Thing is an extremely intelligent and literate play that is also riveting.

Director Gary Griffin does a wonderful job with this play, constantly raising the emotional stakes until the problems become impossible for Henry to avoid. The cast is excellent. Edmund Davys deftly balances Henry's emotional aloofness until he can no longer avoid it. Barbara Robertson is wonderfully bitter as Charlotte, Ned Schmidtke's Max is sympathetic and dim. Elizabeth Ledo, Stephen Rishard and Danny Belrose all give fine performances in supporting roles. The best performance of the evening comes from Kate Collins, as Annie. She is wonderfully in love with Henry, but at the same time dangling over the precipice waiting for him to meet her halfway emotionally.

For good acting and fine early Stoppard, The Real Thing is well worth a visit to Hyde Park.