Recommendations
Books Like The Real Thing
Best books to read after The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard
Readers who love The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard are drawn to its combination of emotional directness, the famous cricket bat speech defending formal perfection in writing, and the investigation of what is authentic in love and art — they want plays and novels that deal with the relationship between intellectual sophistication and genuine feeling, adultery and its emotional costs, and the question of what makes a love story real.
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Arcadia
by Tom Stoppard
The later and more intellectually complex companion — Thomasina, Septimus, Hannah, and the Sidley Park estate. Companion Stoppard plays organized around the relationship between the intellectual and the emotional: both are love stories concealed in philosophical investigations
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard
The earlier companion. Reading Stoppard in order shows how The Real Thing represents his turn toward the personal and emotional: Rosencrantz is organized around philosophical game-playing; The Real Thing around the genuine difficulty of love and art
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The Seagull
by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov's companion about the relationship between artistic ambition and the life of the emotions — Nina, Trigorin, Treplev, Arkadina. Companion investigations of how artists love: whether the capacity for artistic imagination is compatible with the emotional commitment that love requires
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Betrayal
by Harold Pinter
Pinter's companion about the emotional landscape of an adulterous relationship — Emma, Robert, and Jerry. Both are British plays of the late 1970s and early 1980s about adultery, but where Pinter's formal strategy creates ironic distance, Stoppard's creates emotional directness
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion investigation of what authentic feeling looks like in a world of social convention and intellectual sophistication. Companion investigations of the question of authenticity in love: how do you know what is real feeling and what is the performance of feeling?
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Howard's End
by E.M. Forster
Forster's companion organized around 'only connect.' Both The Real Thing and Howard's End are companion British investigations of what is authentic in human relationships: Forster's 'connect the prose and the passion'; Stoppard's Henry's search for 'the real thing' in love and art
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Copenhagen
by Michael Frayn
Frayn's companion in the British drama tradition of the intellectually sophisticated play that conceals an emotional core. Both The Real Thing and Copenhagen are organized around a central question (what is the real thing; what was really said in Copenhagen) whose investigation reveals the inadequacy of pure intellectual analysis for questions that are also emotional
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Art
by Yasmina Reza
Reza's companion in the tradition of the contemporary play about the relationship between aesthetic judgment and personal authenticity. Both Art and The Real Thing are organized around the question of whether aesthetic judgment reveals something true about the person who makes it, and what happens to friendship/love when the aesthetic judgments diverge
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