Eye Weekly - July 5, 2007

"The Real Thing"
Christopher Hoile

Soulpepper's current production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing is superb in every way. The acting, direction and design all combine to present this highly intellectual comedy from 1982 with precision and feeling. The title initially refers to love since a man and woman break up their respective marriages because they think they have found the "real thing" with each other. Yet, this is only the starting point for Stoppard's investigation using various plays-within-plays of our perception of reality in general, whether in the theatre, politics or personal emotion. What interests Stoppard is how thoroughly fiction influences our perception of reality.

Albert Schultz plays Henry, a successful West End playwright who uses his Noel Coward¬like wit as a defence against expressing emotion. He breaks up with his equally witty actress wife Charlotte (the excellent Kristina Nicoll) to take up with another actress, Annie (Megan Follows). The great virtue of Diana Leblanc's direction is how clearly she emphasizes Henry's moral education as the throughline in a play that can seem like a series of clever set pieces. Schultz delineates Henry's change with great subtlety as he gradually comes to accept that life is messier than his absolutist views have allowed. Follows is outstanding in expressing what is said and unsaid in "real" love that accommodates both fallibility and forgiveness.

Source: Eye Weekly

The Globe and Mail - August 4, 2006

"The Real Thing"
Kamal Al-Solaylee

Director Diana Leblanc's production of this 1982 Tom Stoppard classic is cold, flat and sterile in the first act and by the time it hits its stride in the second, it can't quite mask being overheated and rushed. There are many fine moments and performances here, including Megan Follows as Annie and Albert Schultz as Henry, the actress and playwright who must discover if their private passion is the real thing or a doomed affair. But the production as a whole fails to grapple with the play's Pirandellian structure and its equally multilayered currents of feelings.

Source: The Globe and Mail

Now Magazine - June 22, 2006

"It's The Real Thing: Tom Stoppard's Comedy Lives Up To Its Title"
Kate Pedersen

Love's not a battlefield but a massive set of bargains and questions in Tom Stoppard 's comedy The Real Thing. Set among a group of actors and writers sometime in the recent past, the story charts a romance between tempestuous Annie ( Megan Follows ) and playwright Henry ( Albert Shultz ). Their affair takes many modifiers – adulterous, comfortable, complex – and takes shape through Stoppard's wicked humour and awesome sense of metaphor.

Soulpepper heavies Follows and Schultz deliver on great expectations. Schultz's performance as hopelessly single-minded romantic Henry anchors Follows's flighty Annie. Theirs is a polarizing love: he's a team player, she's an individualist; he longs for her devotion, she for his trust. Their chemistry infuses their every action.

Stoppard's favourite device, the play within a play, works here on the literary level by underlining the transience of attachment while setting up some meaty situations for the cast to play.

Guided by director Diana Leblanc , the cast delivers calm yet intense performances. Not even arch British accents spoil Kristina Nicoll 's wry turn as Charlotte, Henry's jilted wife, or C. David Johnson 's pathetic Max, Annie's former mister. They all seem completely at ease with the material, and every one of them makes it look damn easy.

There's so much going on in this script and in these performances that it warrants a second viewing. The intermission lights come as a surprise and the final blackout as a disappointment: this is summer at Soulpepper at its best.

Source: Now Magazine

Ottawa Citizen - May 13, 2006

"Stoppard's Real Thing Fares Well With Canadian Touch"
Janice Kennedy

One of the most watched videos on the Internet is a clip of an American comic who juggles. For four-and-a-half-minutes, to the accompaniment of the Beatles' Golden Slumbers, Chris Bliss keeps three balls in the air, pitching them high, low, sideways, behind, out front, slow, fast -- and always in perfect pitch and rhythm.

It is a dazzling display of finesse.

Not unlike the magic Tom Stoppard creates for the live stage.

Nobody juggles ideas and words like the British playwright, who tosses them into the air, spins them around in a kaleidoscope of colour, and catches them smartly before they go tumbling to the ground. That was apparent when he burst on to the scene in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and it was even more apparent 16 years later when The Real Thing hit the London stage and became an immediate modern classic.

An intellectually provocative evening of theatre, The Real Thing takes intersecting lives in contemporary London and uses them to explore genuineness in love and art and life generally.

Now a fine new revival of the play has premiered in Ottawa, where it opened Thursday at the National Arts Centre Theatre. A co- production with Toronto's innovative Soulpepper company (which opens it at home in Toronto after the Ottawa run), it brings with it an outstanding array of talent, including veteran director Diana Leblanc, Stratford designer Douglas Paraschuk and a cast that stars accomplished actors Albert Schultz (Soulpepper's founding artistic director) and Megan Follows.

The plot -- though this is a play where the cleverly interspliced complications of plot are really just vehicles for philosophical complications splashed with wit and a few belly laughs -- revolves around Henry, a playwright in search of truth in both love and art. Schultz plays him with understated ardour, a suggestion of earnest innocence hiding behind the cynical intelligence. It is an interesting effect. You see flickers of hope dying in him from time to time, as when his first wife Charlotte (Kristina Nicoll) points out to him, "There are no commitments, only bargains."

Follows is Annie, the lover-turned-second-wife, and she brings texture and hints of warmth to a role that has her skittering across the emotional landscape, always searching and not often finding. She and Schultz set the superior acting tone, but there are no false notes anywhere in the cast.

The brilliance of the play -- and this production does it full credit -- is its clever juggling of the "real thing" concept, both in the narrative structure and in the heads of the audience, which Stoppard engages from the beginning and refuses to release. He is less successful tapping into the world of the heart, and The Real Thing can feel desiccated at times and sterile.

But, like the Chris Bliss juggling act, Tom Stoppard is not about emotion. He's about intellectual balls in the air.

Leblanc recognizes this. Her vision of The Real Thing does suggest her usual unerring instinct for the powerhouse effect of words delivered with thrust, timing and a fine comic sensibility. Where it fails sometimes is in its lack of flow, especially toward the end of the second act. Some of the dialogue loses its zing as a result, and what was electric slumps, for a disconcerting moment here and there, into something merely static.

And there are other small negatives, as long as we're registering quibbles. The English accents in the mouths of these Canadian actors, while mostly admirable, tend to ebb and flow in authenticity. And, on opening night at least, there were a couple of miscues -- reaching for a telephone that hadn't yet rung, for example -- surprising in theatre of this calibre. But those are indeed quibbles.

As an expression of the ideal, the ne plus ultra, "the real thing" has been attached to everything from credos to cola to, in Stoppard's play, true love and true art.

Now, this NAC-Soulpepper production puts its own deft spin on the expression.

As pure theatre -- that is, as a skillfully manipulated immersion into a world of ideas and dazzling word-play in mesmerizing mouths - - this Real Thing is (and you saw this coming a mile off) the real thing. Really.

Ottawa Citizen - May 6, 2006

"Stoppard's Real Thing Fares Well With Canadian Touch"
Catherine Lawson

There are three compelling reasons to see The Real Thing, opening Thursday at the National Arts Centre Theatre. First, this 1982 play is the work of brilliant British playwright Tom Stoppard. Second, the cast features Megan Follows and Albert Schultz, two actors well known for their television work who are even better on stage. And third, it's a co-production with Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre, which has a sterling reputation for its interpretations of theatre masterpieces.

Source: Ottawa Citizen

TorontoStage.com - June 15, 2006

"Engaging and Witty"
Sherry Tomaselli

There are few writers walking the earth that have ever been as good as Tom Stoppard and there are even fewer writers who will ever be as good. This is the single most reason to hightail it down to The Young Centre for the Performing Arts to see The Real Thing.

Stoppard's work has always had a sense of life imitating art. He beautifully interweaves other dramatic works into his own plays to illustrate his point. His first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, showed the other side of Hamlet as seen through the eyes of two minor Shakespearean characters. He has done the same with his plays The Real Inspector Hound and Travesties with great success. In The Real Thing, Stoppard uses elements of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Miss Julie as well as a play written by his main character to make his points.

The semi-autobiographical The Real Thing, while not Stoppard's best known work, is a sensitive and tumultuous play about love and relationships. The story revolves around Henry (Albert Schultz), a playwright starting to venture into television. Although very talented and quite successful, he seems to be at a loss when writing about love, partially because he is unable to feel it himself. Henry is the typical intellectual; he can talk all about love, but never in any real sense. When the play begins, Henry is married to an actress, Charlotte (Kristina Nicoll). We quickly discover that Henry is having affair with Annie (Megan Follows), an actress who is married to Max (C. David Johnson), an actor appearing in Henry's current play. As two marriages end and another begin, we begin to see that Henry is incapable of little more than jealousy, and that the terms he lives his life on are about to change. The Real Thing is an extremely intelligent and literate play that is also riveting.

Director Diana Leblanc does a wonderful job with this play, constantly raising the emotional stakes until the problems become impossible for Henry to avoid.

The cast is excellent. Albert Schultz deftly balances Henry's emotional aloofness until he can no longer avoid it. His efforts slightly overshadow Megan Follows' Annie. Follows is hopelessly in love with Henry, but at the same time dangling over the precipice waiting for him to meet her halfway emotionally.

Kristina Nicoll is wonderfully good as Charlotte, C. David Johnson's Max is sympathetic and dim.

The Real Thing is an engaging and witty play, which will make you look at love and the search for happiness in a new way.

Source: TorontoStage.com

Toronto Sun - June 17, 2006

"Soulpepper's Stoppard Play A Good Thing"
John Coulbourn

At a certain point in the second act of Soulpepper's otherwise excellent production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, it hits you: Despite the script's numerous textual disclaimers, offering fair warning against pretty wordplay, director Diana Leblanc has allowed this to become the kind of play that Henry — the playwright at the centre of the story, played here by Albert Schultz — might well have written.

Despite the script's ever-escalating emotional demands, Leblanc allows glibness to carry the day, and her otherwise hugely talented cast is allowed to merely speak Stoppard's lines instead of thinking them through.

This is neither a good thing, nor a real one.

Written in 1982, The Real Thing is nonetheless aging well, a fact revealed in this production, which opened in the Young Centre Thursday night, where it will run through July 29 in a co-production with the National Arts Centre.

Save for a few references to digital watches (does anyone still wear a digital watch?) and Henry's reliance on a typewriter, the play sits comfortably into a modern world where more and more people seem to confuse reality with reality TV.

In fact, what sits at the centre of The Real Thing — finding love, defining it, making it, losing it and enduring it — is perhaps even more germane in our increasingly disconnected world than it was three decades ago.

It all starts with a husband (played by C. David Johnson) confronting his wife (Kristina Nicoll) with her apparent infidelity. And though there is a twist to this first scene, Stoppard returns to similar confrontations throughout the play, raising the emotional stakes each time, adding layer after layer of intelligence and humanity.

But as the romance plays out between Schultz's David and Megan Follows' Annie, the glibness that seemed so charming at the top of the show starts to grate. Regardless of the depth of emotions being portrayed or the intelligence with which they are being explored, Leblanc allows Stoppard's words and ideas to flow from the characters mouths, instead of routing them through the minds from which they would have to be wrenched. There is no discernible growth here.

This is not to say that Schultz and Follows, or to a lesser degree Nicoll and Johnson — or even Matthew Edison and Krystin Pellerin in supporting turns — turn in bad performances. They're good, but they could be better in the way that only Jeff Lillico, cast in a small but pivotal role, seems to have captured. And, sadly, one fears he's only done it to make the character seem stolid.

In order to reflect real life, ironically, The Real Thing this time out needs a few moments of reflection.

Source: Toronto Sun

Toronto Star - June 16, 2006

"Stoppard love tangles smartly acted"
Richard Ouzounian

Three scenes in Tom Stoppard's play, The Real Thing, begin the same way with a man waiting for his wife to return from a trip so he can confront her with evidence of her adultery.

In the excellent Soulpepper production that opened last night, the first time it happens, you laugh. The second time, you think. And the third time, you weep.

All of that is exactly how it should be in this fascinating exploration of truth a nd illusion - in love as well as in art.

Henry is a playwright married to an actress named Charlotte, whom he betrays for another actress, Annie. Before the play is over, Henry will have tasted happiness as well as pain, often wondering if he has become the subject of his favourite song, the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling."

There's also a subplot about Brodie, a soldier arrested for civil disobedience, whose life becomes entwined with Annie's and - once he writes a play about his experiences - with Henry's as well.

It's a play of tremendous wit as well as enormous empathy and Diana Leblanc's production nails both sides of the equation neatly.

Against the perfectly chic and neutral world of Douglas Paraschuk's setting, these people play out their lives in language as clever as Wilde or Coward, but with more intellectual heft and a decidedly post-modern edge.

The cast are superb down the line. Albert Schultz makes the Stoppard-esque author Henry a worthy companion to his Hamlet of last season - a man whose brain is so sharp and whose wit so wounding that he hurts everyone around him, whether he means to or not.

Megan Follows as Annie is a creature of marvellous angles - all flashing elbows and sensually lifted legs - holding the men in her life so tightly you know she's going to let them go before very long.

The two cheated-upon partners are played with admirable skill by C. David Johnson and Kirstina Nicoll. He's got the hangdog appeal of the wounded, while she has the sensual resilience of the survivor.

There's another brief, but marvellous turn from Matthew Edison as Billy, the young actor who walks into Annie's life and doesn't want to leave. Exuding a gauche but boyish charm, Edison turns what could have been an annoying character into an irresistible one.

And as two spiky members of the younger generation, Krystin Pellerin and Jeff Lillico each make the most of their scenes.

The best thing about The Real Thing and this production is that the audience members are treated as intelligent beings, capable of absorbing sophisticated dialogue and complex thoughts without a spoonful of theatrical sugar to make it go down more easily.

It's like a dram of 20-year-old single malt scotch not for every palate, perhaps, but a rare treat for those with a taste for something special.

Source: Toronto Star