Abstract
When the curtain rises on The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard’s most recent comedy, we see a solitary figure, Max, seated in his living room: “[h]e is using a pack of playing cards to build a pyramidical, tiered viaduct on the coffee table in front of him.”1 Suddenly we hear the off-stage front door being opened; Max calls out “Don’t slam —” (p. 9), but before he can finish his sentence, the door slams and his viaduct of cards collapses. The door-slammer is his wife, Charlotte, who appears briefly before disappearing into the hall to hang up her topcoat. Charlotte has just returned from a business trip to Switzerland — or so she claims; the problem is that, during her absence, Max has ransacked her private belongings and discovered her passport in her recipe drawer:
CHARLOTTE... You go through my things when I’m away? (Pause. Puzzled.) Why?
MAX I liked it when I found nothing. You should have just put it [your passport] in your handbag. We’d still be an ideal couple. So to speak.
CHARLOTTE Wouldn’t you have checked to see if it had been stamped?
MAX That’s a very good point. I notice that you never went to Amsterdam when you went to Amsterdam. I must say I take my hat off to you, coming home with Rembrandt place mats for your mother. It’s those little touches that lift adultery out of the moral arena and make it a matter of style. (p. 13)
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Notes
Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing (Boston and London, revised 1984), p. 9. All further page references will be cited in the body of my text. When I originally wrote this paper in the fall of 1982, I based my reading of the play on the text of The Real Thing which had only just been published. Since it had been published to coincide with the play’s London première (November 1982), I knew that I was dealing, in effect, with a prerehearsal text, and that the play as performed would have doubtless differed significantly, given Stoppard’s usual theatre practice, from the text of that first edition. Such was indeed the case, as subsequent editions of the text (1983, 1984) reflected the actual performance texts of the play in London and New York, respectively. I have accordingly made some slight revisions to this paper in order to bring it into line with the most recently published edition of the play.
Tom Stoppard, “Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas” (interview), Theatre Quarterly, 4 (May-July 1974), 6.
Christopher Hampton, The Philanthropist (London, 1970, p. 36..
Tom Stoppard, Travesties (London, 1975, p. 58..
Cf. John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. Mark Stavig (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1966), I.ii.180–216; II.i.1–16.
Jean Genet, The Maids, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London, 1957), p. 13.
Henry James, “The Real Thing,” in The Portable Henry James, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel, rev. Lyall H. Powers (New York, 1977), p. 134....
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© 1993 Hersh Zeifman and Cynthia Zimmerman
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Zeifman, H. (1993). Comedy of Ambush: Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. In: Zeifman, H., Zimmerman, C. (eds) Contemporary British Drama, 1970–90. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10819-0_15
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