Love is complicated.

But that's not how it's usually portrayed in popular culture. Either you find your true love and all is hearts and flowers, or you lose him or her and are lost to despair.

Long-term relationships are more complex than that, of course. There are small daily compromises, built-up petty grievances and the occasional outright betrayal, as well as warm, shared memories and unexpected joys. Marriages are not rom-coms. They are marathons.

Depending on your point of view, Tom Stoppard may be the ideal playwright to tackle the tangles of love — or the worst. He is perhaps the most intellectual of our living playwrights and so able to tease out nuance and sub-textual emotion from the mundane details of life. But that erudition can swing into a cold pedantry, the very opposite of love.

That contradiction is at the heart of the problem with Roundabout Theatre's production of Stoppard's most accessible play, "The Real Thing." Stoppard's text on love is brilliant and insightful, as well as acerbic. In the end, he says, love is real when it exists despite frailty and disappointment. "I have to choose who I hurt," one character says, "and I choose you because I am yours." 

But the cast here is often chilly and turns his words into a brittle scholarly argument instead of raw observations from the gut. None of the couples seem like they are in love — or even as if they were once in love but now detest each other.

That's surprising, because it's a powerhouse ensemble. Ewan McGregor, usually so soulful, and the effervescent Maggie Gyllenhaal leave their spouses (Cynthia Nixon and Josh Hamilton) for each other and true love. Or so they think. Over time, though, McGregor's character Henry realizes that love is not the 1960s girl-group pop song he suspected it was and that he adores. It is something that hurts more, costs more and delivers more. 

Cynthia Nixon and Ian McGregor in "The Real Thing."

(Joan Marcus)

Director Sam Gold, who directed Broadway's perfect The Realistic Joneses (also about marriage), does something interesting (if distracting) with the music — he threads those saccharine pop songs through the otherwise silent transitions between scenes. The point is to contrast the hostility on stage with the portrayal of love in pop culture.

And, voilà!  The missing warmth and sense of connection. There it is, in the exchange of gazes between characters, the distracted touches as they straighten the set, plumping the pillows and shifting the magazines.

And there it is again, except more passionately, in Henry's show-stopping monologue about writing, using the metaphor of a cricket bat. 

If only that electricity sparked through the rest of the production. Instead, this play that's supposed to be about love feels devoid of any emotion at all.