Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Cynthia Nixon star in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s new production of Tom Stoppard’s "The Real Thing."

“What happens when you stop thinking, and start feeling?” asks the marquee at the American Airlines Theatre, where the show opened on October 30th. The tag line capitalizes on play’s mystique. It first premiered in London in 1982, and opened on Broadway in 1984, winning the Tony Award for Best Drama that year. On both sides of the Atlantic it was hailed as a watershed for the author of such manically erudite comedies as "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," "Jumpers," and "Travesties."

Joan Juliet Buck profiled Stoppard — and his new play — for Vogue in March 1984.

“Stoppard’s plays flattered the intelligence of the audience and the audience came out whistling the puns,” she said. “So here’s this magnificent playwright, who is not a kitchen-sink playwright, he is not a playwright of the unbearable tension of the unsaid like Pinter; he’s someone with fireworks, verbal fireworks, but the question always was ‘where is his heart? What does he care about what are his feelings; is he going to make me cry?’”

"The Real Thing" seemed to be the play to do it. Compared to the intellectual vaudeville of his earlier works, with their references to Hamlet, and Oscar Wilde, and academic philosophy, the play has a straightforward plot: Henry, a playwright married to an actress, Charlotte, falls in love with another actress, Annie. When their affair is discovered, they leave their spouses and marry. The rest of the play is about their attempts to make this new marriage succeed.

“And of course because the hero is a playwright there was this immediate assumption that Tom Stoppard, from his fortress of words, was dealing with his own personal problems about love,” said Buck. “It seemed to reveal things about him that had been out of reach before.”

Henry has the verbal dazzle we associate with Stoppard’s characters, but he has to learn about feelings the hard way, said Cynthia Nixon.

“He’s king of the world, but it really is the moment when he stops thinking and starts feeling he realizes that the brain is not the only organ you need — you need the heart too.”
Nixon has a unique perspective on the play. She’s currently cast as Charlotte, Henry’s discarded first wife. But she played his teenage daughter Debbie in the first New York production.

“And while I understood it intellectually, I think now, being a middle- aged person who’s experienced marriage and separation, child-sharing and all sorts of grown-up big messy things like that, I understand it on a whole other level,” she said.

Sam Gold directed this new production, and said he was drawn to Stoppard’s play because it uses language to explore emotion — unlike many contemporary writers, whose works are about “the failure of language.” One way Stoppard does that is to play both sides of the field, dramatically speaking. “The arguments Stoppard creates in this play are brilliant,” notes Gold, “because they sound like something Tom would say, but then he gives another character the opposite argument, and sometimes, the character you think is arguing against Tom, has the upper hand, or wins.”

Roundabout Theatre Company's "The Real Thing" with Ewan McGregor (l), Cynthia Nixon, Josh Hamilton, Maggie Gyllenhaal

(Joan Marcus/Roundabout Theatre)

The play’s many topics of debate include love, marriage, and fidelity, and the function of writing itself. Gold said that if you’re someone in the arts, “you connect with how to live and love and find your way as a person who creates fiction.”

In one impassioned speech, Henry defends the importance of good writing (Annie has accused him of being an intellectual snob): “I don’t think that writers are sacred, but words are. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little,” he said.

Stoppard went on to “nudge the world” a lot in such intellectually complex works as "Arcadia" and "The Invention of Love," and politically aware ones like "Rock ‘n Roll" and "The Coast of Utopia." But Joan Juliet Buck has a soft spot for "The Real Thing."

“It was the first piece about relationship, about love, about betrayal, about the danger of the limits and constraints of emotion. I think at the time I remember being disappointed that the play wasn’t about happiness, but about the impossibility of happiness, the endless navigation of bad, rocky coastline; it’s a very brave investigation.”

And a tender one. As they navigate love, betrayal and the dangers of emotion, Stoppard’s characters are always asking “Are you all right?”