It has sometimes been said of Tom Stoppard, by others besides me, that there is nothing going on beneath the glossy, slippery surface of his bright ideas and arch dialogue. With The Real Thing …, he has decided to confound his more skeptical critics by chipping a hole in the ice for us to peek through—under the proper conditions, no doubt, suitable also for fishing. You've probably heard by now what's swimming around this chilly pond. The "real thing" is Stoppard's amorous equivalent of the "right stuff"—grace and style in the performance of a difficult task, in this case conducting erotic relationships.

In short, Britain's leading intellectual entertainer is now exhibiting a highly publicized, well-congratulated capacity not just for verbal and literary pyrotechnics but also for feeling, in that his characters can actually experience such human emotions as jealousy, envy, sorrow, and passion. Hearing these exotic emotions expressed, I was reminded of Racine's Phèdre, where the lovesick heroine has been assuming all the while that Hippolytus is frigid, only to discover that he has actually been in love with the young Aricie. "Hippolytus can feel!" says the astonished Phèdre, "but not for me." Mr. Stoppard's aberrational display of sentience left me equally bereft and isolated. (p. 28)

Considering how few people can resist a sophisticated love story, The Real Thing is destined to be one of the big hits of the Broadway season, and, when the rights are released, a reigning favorite of middlebrow theater companies. I found it rather coldhearted in its good-natured way, a frozen trifle with little aftertaste. Stoppard has doubtless made some effort to examine his own personal and literary problems, and his writing is rarely defensive or self-serving. But despite the autobiographical yeast leavening the familiar digestible cake mix, The Real Thing is just another clever exercise in the Mayfair mode, where all of the characters (the proletarian Brodie excepted) share the same wit, artifice, and ornamental diction. Even Henry's teen-age daughter, at the very moment that she is teasing her father for writing always about "infidelity among the architect class," is fashioning sentences ("Exclusive rights isn't love," she says, "it's colonization") apparently designed for inclusion in a Glossary of Post-Restoration Epigrams. No wonder Stoppard has her refer to herself as "virgo syntacta."

I think I might be less immune to the charms of this admittedly harmless piece of trivia were it not being tarted up everywhere to pass for, well, the real thing. It comes no closer to reality than any of those other adultery plays recently exported from England—and it doesn't even possess the mordancy of Harold Pinter's Betrayal or the ingenuity of Peter Nichols's Passion. Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard has managed to perfect an expatriate's gift for mimicry—allied to his ear for language is his unique capacity to imitate play-writing styles. But if he began his career impersonating Beckett and Pirandello (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) or Bernard Shaw (Jumpers) or Joyce and Wilde (Travesties), he has recently, along with a large number of contemporaries in the English theater, come entirely under the influence of Noel Coward's witty sangfroid. The question is whether this is a style more appropriate to simulating reality or creating escapism, whether, at this critical point in world history, we are more in need of rhetorical artifice—or poetic truth. (pp. 28-9)