James McArdle as Henry and
Susan Wokoma as Charlotte
The Real Thing
The Old Vic Theatre, London
September 2024
Photo by Manuel Harlan
085 – The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard
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Tom Stoppard’s clever, romantic exploration of love and literature, The Real Thing, was first performed at the Strand theatre in London in November 1982, with a cast headed by Roger Rees and Felicity Kendall. In 1982 Stoppard had been writing plays for more than 15 years, starting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, with its fairy-tale breakthrough at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966. He was renowned for his intellectual wit and playful dramatic form, which are certainly on show in this play, but The Real Thing also explores more personal, emotional territory – on what constitutes the real thing in love, politics and art.
As we record this episode a new production of the play is on stage at the Old Vic theatre in London. Having seen and loved The Real Thing when it premiered all those years ago, I’m very excited to have the chance to revisit the play. My guest in this episode to help us navigate the play’s romantic entanglements and structural twists is the renowned arts journalist, and Stoppard afficionado, Mark Lawson.
Mark Lawson
Mark Lawson is a journalist, broadcaster, author and playwright. He is a cultural critic and feature writer for The Guardian, writes regularly about TV for Radio Times, and is theatre critic of The Tablet. His work as a broadcaster includes Mark Lawson Talks To… (BBC4), Front Row (on Radio 4) and Late Review / Review / Newsnight Review (on BBC2). He has also written TV drama, at least five novels and more than two dozen radio plays for the BBC.
Mark recommended An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen.
(See episode 077 – click her to listen)
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
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