Reading Order
The Real Thing Reading Order
The Real Thing (1982) by Tom Stoppard is the most emotionally direct of his plays — Henry, a playwright, is married to Charlotte, an actress; his best friend Max is married to Annie, also an actress; Henry and Annie begin an affair, leave their spouses, and marry; and then Annie begins a relationship with the young actor Billy. The play is organized around the question in its title: what is 'the real thing' in love, in art, in life? Henry's defence of 'real' writing (the famous cricket bat speech, in which he describes good writing as a cricket bat whose value lies in its formal perfection — in the way it transfers the full energy of the shot to the ball, unlike 'bad' writing, which merely makes a noise) is Stoppard's most direct statement of his aesthetic beliefs. The play is also Stoppard's most autobiographical: like Henry, Stoppard was a writer who left his wife for the actress Miriam Moore-Robinson during the period the play was written. The original production starred Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal; the 1984 Broadway production starred Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close.
Where to start
The Real Thing (1982) — the complete text. Best Stoppard reading order: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead → Jumpers → Travesties → The Real Thing → Arcadia
Complete The Real Thing Book List
- 1Buy
The Real Thing
Tom Stoppard·1982·The most emotionally direct Stoppard play — Henry, Annie, Charlotte, Max, and the question of what is real in love and art. The play with the most famous passage in contemporary British drama: Henry's cricket bat speech defending the formal perfection of good writing. Winner of the Olivier Award and the Tony Award for Best Play - 2Buy
Arcadia
Tom Stoppard·1993·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, and both ask what authentic feeling looks like against a backdrop of sophisticated intellectual performance - 3Buy
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Tom Stoppard·1966·The earlier companion that established Stoppard's reputation — Ros and Guil inside the plot of Hamlet. Reading Stoppard in order shows how The Real Thing represents Stoppard's turn toward the personal and emotional: Rosencrantz is organized around philosophical game-playing; The Real Thing around the genuine difficulty of love and art - 4Buy
The Seagull
Anton Chekhov·1895·Chekhov's companion in the tradition of the play about the relationship between artistic ambition and the life of the emotions — Nina, Trigorin, Treplev, Arkadina. The Real Thing and The Seagull are companion investigations of the same question: how does the artist love? And is the capacity for artistic imagination compatible with the emotional commitment that love requires? Henry's complaint about Annie is Treplev's complaint about Arkadina - 5Buy
Betrayal
Harold Pinter·1978·Pinter's companion about the emotional landscape of an adulterous relationship — Emma, Robert, and Jerry. Both The Real Thing and Betrayal are British plays of the late 1970s and early 1980s organized around the emotional consequences of adultery, but where Pinter's formal strategy (reverse chronology) creates ironic distance, Stoppard's creates emotional directness - 6Buy
An Affair to Remember
Various·1957·The companion in the cultural tradition of the romance that explores whether genuine love ('the real thing') can survive the obstacles that stand between two people who have found each other. The Real Thing is Stoppard's investigation of the same question at a more sophisticated philosophical level: what makes a love genuine, and how do you know you have found 'the real thing' rather than a convincing imitation? - 7Buy
Middlemarch
George Eliot·1871·Eliot's companion in the literary tradition of the investigation of what authentic feeling looks like in a world of social convention and intellectual sophistication — Dorothea and Will Ladislaw's love. The Real Thing and Middlemarch are companion investigations of the question of authenticity in love: how do you know what is real feeling and what is the performance of feeling? - 8Buy
Howard's End
E.M. Forster·1910·Forster's companion organized around the question 'only connect' — the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. The Real Thing and Howard's End are companion British investigations of the question 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
The Real Thing — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the cricket bat speech in The Real Thing by Stoppard?
The cricket bat speech is Henry's defence of formal perfection in writing, and it's the most famous passage in contemporary British drama. Henry is arguing with Annie about a play written by Brodie, a political prisoner whose cause Annie supports, and which Henry thinks is badly written. Henry picks up a cricket bat and explains: a cricket bat is an 'object of utility and beauty' because it is made precisely to do what a cricket bat does — it has 'the perfect weight and balance, it's perfectly designed to exploit the momentum of the swing and the mass of the bat.' Bad writing is like a plank: you can hit someone with it, but you can't play cricket with it. The point is that good writing — by which Henry means writing that observes the formal conventions, that works with the grain of language, that achieves its effects through precision rather than passion alone — is not an expression of the writer's personality or politics but an object whose value lies in what it can do. The speech is Stoppard's defence of formalism against political writing — against the idea that writing's value lies in its subject matter or political position rather than in its formal achievement. It is also a self-defence: Stoppard is a formalist playwright whose plays are often criticized for being too clever, too concerned with ideas, and not sufficiently political, and Henry is Stoppard's version of himself defending his own practice.
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