The Real Thing: Analysis of Major Characters
"The Real Thing" is a play by Tom Stoppard that explores complex themes of love, fidelity, and the nature of relationships through its major characters. The protagonist, Henry, is a successful playwright whose understanding of love is challenged by the women in his life: his ex-wife Charlotte, his current wife Annie, and their daughter Debbie. Henry’s journey reveals his struggles with emotional authenticity and the impact of his artistic ideals on his personal relationships. Annie, a passionate actress and activist, embodies the generational shift in attitudes toward love and commitment, while Charlotte acts as a mirror to Henry, highlighting his misconceptions about marriage and emotional engagement.
Debbie, their teenager, adds a modern perspective, critiquing traditional ideas of love with her views on free love and personal autonomy. Brodie, a politically charged playwright, contrasts with Henry, showcasing a different approach to writing and life, and serves to further complicate Henry's views on art and love. Other characters, like Billy and Max, interact within this dynamic, illustrating the complexities and nuances of romantic entanglements. Through these diverse characters, "The Real Thing" offers a rich examination of the intersections between personal and artistic lives, inviting audiences to reflect on the true essence of love and commitment.
The Real Thing: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Tom Stoppard
First published: 1982
Genre: Play
Locale: England
Plot: Comedy
Time: The 1980's
Henry, a successful playwright in his forties for whom writing about love is difficult. His play, A House of Cards, has just opened. Its first act is the first act of The Real Thing. Henry, a partially autobiographical character, changes in the course of the play as he is educated in what love is by the three women in his life: his former wife, his current wife, and his daughter. Acknowledging to his precocious teenage daughter the verity of her perception of him as an ironist in public and a prig in private, he reluctantly accepts modern attitudes toward marriage as the result of his wife's affairs and his daughter's colorfully honest appraisal of him. As a husband, he takes his wives for granted and leaves them with unfulfilled needs. His belief in the artist's removal from personal emotions and political causes creates tensions with Annie, as it had with his first wife. As an artist, he believes in the innocence, neutrality, and precision of words as the means for building “bridges across incomprehension and chaos” and regards his short-lived rival in love, Brodie, as a writer of rubbish. Even so, he finally admits that in love, unlike art, “dignified cuckoldry, although difficult, can be done.”
Annie, Henry's second wife, a twenty-five-year-old actress and activist in political marches. She is Henry's mistress at the start of the play. Like her predecessor, Charlotte, in Henry's real life, she takes lovers and argues with Henry about her needs. Her roles bring her into close contact with Billy, another actor, and her activism in liberal movements involves her with a politically committed dramatist, Brodie, who is boorish and artistically inferior to Henry. She reacts angrily to Henry's jealousy of Brodie with a reference to Henry's “fastidious taste.”
Brodie, a twenty-five-year-old loutish dramatist who has spent time in prison as a result of his protests against nuclear missiles and other political injustices. He meets Annie on a train en route to a demonstration and interests her in a role in his television play. As a dramatist committed to causes, he writes with his “guts” and is incensed when he discovers that Henry, at Annie's request, has rewritten a television play that Brodie wrote.
Charlotte, Henry's former wife, roughly thirty-five years old, who serves as a double character—in Henry's play and in The Real Thing. In both, she is the unfaithful wife. She informs Henry that he cannot write plays about women and that she has had a number of lovers, the most recent of whom was an architect. In the play within the play, Charlotte is married to Max, who is also an architect. Charlotte, as Henry's former wife, educates him regarding his erroneous view of marriage as a commitment that is finished when made, insisting that it needs daily renewal.
Debbie, Charlotte and Henry's very modern seventeen-year-old daughter, who has her own advice for Henry in regard to his marital problems. She states that free love is free of the old propaganda and that exclusive rights to a person “isn't love, it's colonization.” Her father's own daughter, she is as articulate about her views on free love as Henry is about his love of language.
Billy, an actor, about twenty-two years old, with whom Annie rehearses love scenes from August Strindberg's Miss Julie and John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore. Both rehearsals become metaphors for Annie's affair with Billy. Billy likes the content of Brodie's plays even as he recognizes that Henry is a much better writer.
Max, who is about forty years old, also an actor and a double character who appears in both plays. In The House of Cards, he is the architect, and in The Real Thing, he is in love with Annie and, consequently, despondent at the news of her affair with Henry. He eventually falls in love again and calls at the end to inform Henry that if it were not for Henry, he would not be currently engaged. His roles in both the play and the play within the play are minor.