Stoppard’s brainy love story melts our hearts

One of the finest speeches in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing (and there are several), concerns the absolute value of good construction, using a cricket bat as an example. Henry (McGregor), an emotionally moderate but aesthetically conservative playwright, explains to second wife, Annie (Gyllenhaal), that they’re specially built to give maximum propulsion to the struck ball. “What we’re trying to do,” he sums up, “is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might…travel.” True to form, The Real Thing (1982) is exceedingly well made, a keen and touching study of fidelity, fiction and marital love among theater folk. Its craftsmanship is so solid, in fact, it resists director Sam Gold’s well-meaning attempts to improve it. Over past seasons, I’ve been pleased to see the Roundabout bringing Gold in to rethink classics such as Look Back in Anger and Picnic. He knows that foreshortened space or foregrounded design can work dramaturgical wonders, blow the dust off. With Stoppard, though, you don’t need to tinker much; it’s all on the page. Gold’s work with the actors is perfectly sound; McGregor and Gyllenhaal are naturally charismatic, intelligent performers who deliver Stoppard’s brainy badinage with nervy aplomb.