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The Real Thing
Sep. 29th, 2005 12:22 pmTuesday I went to the Huntington production of The Real Thing (Tom Stoppard). It's the story of a playwright whose marriage dissolves when he finds a new person instead (the program says that this is the most autobiographical of his plays), and like all his plays, it's full of word play and literary allusion.
The witty one-liners and bits of dialogue are a lot of fun, as are the scenes of plays within the play. What goes around does indeed come around, and there seems to be a new equilibrium reached when the former doer is done to (how's that for a non-spoiler?).
The set is impressive, with walls that slide up, sets that slide out, and a 'roof' that caves in effectively onto a bed, symbolizing the end of that relationship (it took the crew most of the intermission to clean up all of the white crumbled pieces). A minor theme in the play is about music, classic rock, the songs of the 50s and 60s that no one admits to liking anymore, and almost every scene had music in it, as well as the dark time between acts.
The actors managed their English/Scottish accents fairly well, though I don't doubt that someone from across the pond would've noticed something slightly off, somewhere.
And though there were lots of funny lines, as a whole it isn't as wonderful as some of his other work. A little too self-conscious, perhaps. It felt like it was about half an hour longer than it needed to be. The entanglements just weren't complicated enough for the length of the show.
From the program, some Stoppard quotes I rather liked:
Side note: all but one of the actors have been on some incarnation of Law & Order.
Last year I got a subscription to the BU School of Theatre season; can't beat 4 plays for $20, right? But I'm not sure, given this year's plays: Brecht on Brecht (the Brecht I've seen has not been to my taste), Scenes from an Execution (which I saw last year at Brandeis), Aurora Borealis IV: a Festival of Light and Movement, and Arcadia (which is wonderful, but I just saw this summer for the fourth time, I think). So I'm debating. Opinions? Interest?
The witty one-liners and bits of dialogue are a lot of fun, as are the scenes of plays within the play. What goes around does indeed come around, and there seems to be a new equilibrium reached when the former doer is done to (how's that for a non-spoiler?).
The set is impressive, with walls that slide up, sets that slide out, and a 'roof' that caves in effectively onto a bed, symbolizing the end of that relationship (it took the crew most of the intermission to clean up all of the white crumbled pieces). A minor theme in the play is about music, classic rock, the songs of the 50s and 60s that no one admits to liking anymore, and almost every scene had music in it, as well as the dark time between acts.
The actors managed their English/Scottish accents fairly well, though I don't doubt that someone from across the pond would've noticed something slightly off, somewhere.
And though there were lots of funny lines, as a whole it isn't as wonderful as some of his other work. A little too self-conscious, perhaps. It felt like it was about half an hour longer than it needed to be. The entanglements just weren't complicated enough for the length of the show.
From the program, some Stoppard quotes I rather liked:
"The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say."
"In general terms, I'm not interested in character with a capital K and psychology a capital S. I'm a playwright interested in ideas and forced to invent characters to express those ideas.... They speak as I do."
"I write plays bbecause wirting dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting myself. I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. Forever. Endlessly."
Side note: all but one of the actors have been on some incarnation of Law & Order.
Last year I got a subscription to the BU School of Theatre season; can't beat 4 plays for $20, right? But I'm not sure, given this year's plays: Brecht on Brecht (the Brecht I've seen has not been to my taste), Scenes from an Execution (which I saw last year at Brandeis), Aurora Borealis IV: a Festival of Light and Movement, and Arcadia (which is wonderful, but I just saw this summer for the fourth time, I think). So I'm debating. Opinions? Interest?