It is not only young people who will experience that “back to school” sensation this week. London theatre springs into action after what felt like less of a summer break than usual with the first of the autumn’s big-hitters, a strongly cast revival of Tom Stoppard’s wordy but hollow 1982 rumination upon real life versus fiction, fidelity against infidelity. For all the play’s flaws, James McCardle and rising star of television Bel Powley are terrific in the leading roles.
The scenes in Max Webster’s production unfold on a succession of interchangeably minimalist living room spaces, complete with clinically arranged cut flowers. The first scene, in which a husband suspects his wife of having an affair, turns out to be from the latest play by Henry (McCardle); the wife is played by his own wife Charlotte (Susan Wokoma), and the husband is played by Max (Oliver Johnstone), his friend who is married to Annie (Powley), herself an actress, with whom Henry is engaged in an illicit relationship. And thus we set off, tracing Stoppard’s daisy chain of love, lust and theatre. Is anything, asks the playwright, incontrovertibly “real” or are we condemned forever to play a part?
Henry, smug and self-satisfied down to a bouffant hairdo that takes up more space than it should, speaks every line as if he’s anthologising himself. We first encounter him effortfully compiling his choices for Desert Island Discs; heaven forfend he should pick the music he actually likes, for fear of weakening his intellectual cachet. For all his superciliousness, Henry is very funny and irritatingly quotable, which is a blessing, as this suspiciously Stoppard-like writer has many lengthy speeches to get through. McCardle makes fine work of a man who loves the sound of his own voice, but whose confidence falters when it comes to talking, or writing, about true love.
Where Wokoma is witty, weary and sarcastic, Powley is direct, emotional and restless, always longing for something that Henry can’t quite provide for her. In a further riff on the truth/fiction theme, a continuing blurring of the boundaries, Webster has the stage hands shift the furniture in a deliberately animated fashion, breaking into a jaunty choreographed dance at one point. Henry, it transpires, is not the only writer in the set-up; Annie has got to know an imprisoned soldier who has also written a play. Yet, questions Henry, does this count as “real” writing?
On it goes, slick but arid and when it ends it’s a challenge to know what we’re meant to take away from it. Apart, that is, from this pearl of wisdom: never date a playwright or an actor.
To 26 October, Old Vic Theatre (0344 871 7628, oldvictheatre.com)