The Real Thing (Style)

Style

Realism

The Real Thing marks a major departure in style for Stoppard: an abandonment of Absurdist styles for an exploration of Realist technique. Stoppard’s move from Absurdism to Realism is apparent in the first scene, when Max speaks at length, and apparently without purpose, about the difference between Japanese and Swiss watches. It is a funny, albeit baffling, speech. A moment later, however, the audience realizes that the digression has real meaning. The “utterly reliable” Swiss watches are losing out to the “snare” and “delusion” of Japanese watches, just as solid, stable marriages are being replaced with no-strings-attached affairs.

Later, when Henry and Annie’s embrace is interrupted by the impatient beeping of Henry’s wrist-watch, Stoppard humorously reminds the audience of his earlier metaphor — a thoroughly modern one for time’s intrusion into love. It is a metaphor that melds modern context with eternal themes.

The characters are concerned with “real life” dramas, such as adultery, money, and family trouble, and the action takes place in living rooms and train carriages, not court yards and throne rooms. Just as the setting is realistic and contemporary, so too is the language. Henry’s cricket bat speech, in Act II, scene 1, is a good example of Stoppard’s attempt to show his audience the poetry and drama of everyday life in everyday language. “What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that we when throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might... travel....”

Perhaps Stoppard’s departure from the chaos and incomprehensibility that is characteristic of Absurdism to the making sense of the everyday that is characteristic of Realism is best seen in the character of Henry. His dependence upon humor and word-play suggests that he is alienated from “real” language and incapable of expressing his emotions without being ironic.

This conundrum is most clear in a conversation Henry and Debbie have about love. “Well, I remember, the first time I succumbed to the sensation that the universe was dispensable minus one lady — .” Debbie, interrupting, tells him that he should “speak” rather than “write”: he should be serious rather than ironic, truthful rather than flippant. Unexpectedly, he responds from the heart. “What lovers trust each other with,” he tells her, is “knowledge of each other... knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.” Real language, contemporary language, can express universal dilemmas as eloquently as elevated Shakespearean verse can, and real life can be as powerful an experience as hyperbolic representations of it in art.

The Play-Within-The-Play

In The Real Thing, Stoppard uses a favorite theatrical device, the play-within-a-play. His most notable and extensive use of this technique is evident in his landmark Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, which centers around two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and employs the classic as its backdrop (in this case Stoppard’s play is actually the “play within” that is contained within the universe of Shakespeare’s “play”). In The Real Thing, Stoppard carries this device to a new level. There are not one but four plays-within-the-play: Henry’s House of Cards, a fictional play; John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s A Whore; August Strindberg’s Miss Julie; and Brodie’s unnamed TV drama, another fictional play. Stoppard’s use of them profoundly affects the play’s meaning.

The device of the play-within-a-play works to trigger events in the play — the “Mousetrap” in Hamlet, for instance — or to comment satirically on events within the play — the figures of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for example. The device also allows the playwright to emphasize certain themes. The opening scene in The Real Thing, for instance, prefigures the revelation of Henry’s adultery, the disintegration of his marriage, as well as his characteristic over-reliance on irony and wit to control his emotions.

The device of the play-within-a-play in The Real Thing has other functions, too, most noticeably the creation of ironic and humorous contrasts. The sophisticated bedroom drama House of Cards, and Brodie’s crude TV play that book-end The Real Thing are qualitatively a gulf apart. Henry’s language does not tell, it reveals: Henry’s mind is analytic and subtle. Brodie’s language not only tells, it hammers home the obvious and destroys any drama in the process: Brodie’s thinking is crude and simplistic. The plays demonstrates the difference between the two men’s perception of the world and their vision of art. The dramatic works also create a clearer contrast between the two men to whom Annie devotes herself.

Additionally, much of the play’s humor derives from the contrast between theatrical representations of life in The Real Thing (the extracts from Miss Julie and House of Cards) and Stoppard’s representation of real life in The Real Thing. In Act II, scene 2, Billy and Annie rehearse a love scene from ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore. Annie stops rehearsing when Billy becomes “less and less discreet,” but he continues to read from the script. The contrast between her colloquial language and his elevated language, between him continuing to rehearse and her ceasing to, intensifies both the humor and the passion of the scene. The device of the play-within-the-play is thus central to the overall development of themes and characters.