Publishers Weekly
A talented ensemble cast brings to life Stoppard's classic play featuring the loves and loves lost of playwright Henry; his wife, Charlotte; an actor named Max; and his activist wife, Annie. Featuring a play within a play, this production is superbly performed if slightly confusing in audiobook format—it's often difficult to keep track of who is speaking and to keep track of the endlessly reconfiguring relationships. Henry searches for meaning both in art and romantic relationships as he attempts to write a play about his love for Annie and begrudgingly ghostwrites a play for Brodie, an incarcerated soldier and talentless, aspiring playwright. Templeman shines as Henry, perfectly capturing his wit, bravado and pathos. With terrific performances from the supporting cast, this audiobook will delight Stoppard fans and theater lovers. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Praise for The Real Thing:
“In The Real Thing . . . [Stoppard] turns his attention to private passion—and he does so without mortgaging an intellect that has few equals in the contemporary theater . . . Not only Mr. Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing plays that anyone has written about love and marriage in years . . . Densely and entertainingly packed with wit, ideas and feelings.”—Frank Rich, New York Times
“A play of ideas, passionately held and eloquently written from start to finish . . . The Real Thing is the real thing, a play by a world-class writer, a play with insights that follow you out of the theater and deep into the night.”—Los Angeles Times
“Exquisite . . . Stoppard brings head and heart, life and art together in an exhilarating way . . . The Real Thing moves with a restless energy, bouncing forward two years and complicating the action with new lovers and new plays. Stoppard works it all into a play that is at once tightly structured and expansive.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Tom Stoppard is justly renowned for his erudition and wit, but in his 1980s drama The Real Thing he also found a (philandering) heartbeat.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Fidelity, love, fiction, passion, authenticity—these are just a few of the juicy issues running around Tom Stoppard’s masterful 1982 marital drama . . . The Real Thing (1982) is exceedingly well made, a keen and touching study of fidelity, fiction and marital love . . . Stoppard’s brainy love story melts our hearts.”—Time Out New York
“This play[’s] . . . intellectual pyrotechnics are matched by its heart.”—Hollywood Reporter
“Highly entertaining, showcasing Stoppard’s sparkling wit and barbed observations of fidelity and marriage . . . Stoppard’s slicing-and-dicing bon mots are delivered with clarity and precision.”—Broadway World
“[The Real Thing] is about both love and art, and it is wise, witty, and astonishing through and through . . . Enthralling.”―Financial Times (UK)
“You couldn’t ask for a more deeply felt, or more deeply affecting, drama about love than this . . . The Real Thing is indeed the genuine article—a play of strength, grace, melancholy and wit.”―Daily Telegraph (UK)
“When it comes to putting erotic love in its place, no contemporary English playwright has done so with such illuminating rigour or eloquence as Tom Stoppard.”―Evening Standard (UK)
“A heart-wrenching play . . . [and] poignant postmodern comedy.”—Guardian
SEPTEMBER 2009 - AudioFile
Wordsmith Tom Stoppard's semiautobiographical romantic comedy wowed audiences on the West End and Broadway. This superbly performed audio version, recorded before an appreciative studio audience, does the same. Henry, a playwright known for his witty and cynical oeuvre, is in real life a romantic—an insecure one at that. The infidelities of Annie, the actress he loves, and her incomprehensible support for a thuggish Scottish radical force him to reexamine his idea of the "real thing" he yearns for. Particularly in the mouths of Simon Templeman, as Henry, and Carolyn Seymour, as Henry's first wife, the dialogue sparkles. As Annie, Joanne Whalley does a serviceable job but has two problems. She occasionally steps on Henry's laughs, and she doesn't vocally project the appeal that makes Henry's predicament so acute. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
