There are several circularities drawn around what is real and what is part of a fiction in Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play about love and the art of playwriting. They come right from the off, in an opening scene with a husband discovering a wife’s affair.
The cuckold is in fact an actor, Max (Oliver Johnstone), playing a part opposite Charlotte (Susan Wokoma), in a play within this play that is written by the latter’s husband, Henry (James McArdle).
The fictional scene’s real-world parallels soon emerge – more circles – when we learn that Henry is having an affair with Annie (Bel Powley), who is Max’s real-life wife, and there is even a cleverly incriminating handkerchief in Stoppard’s exploration of male jealousy that seems playfully reminiscent of Desdemona’s in Othello.
Other rugs are pulled and what is remarkable about the architecture of the play is that its wrongfootings still work, although it certainly feels dated in its sexual dynamics (thank God some of the script’s queasiest language on sex and rape have been excised here), as well as its references to Swiss watches and the advent of VHS.
This is Stoppard at his tricksy best but simultaneously at his most sincere, it seems, because at this drama’s heart is a timeless study of passion and art that 40 years on remains – rather like the insides of a well-made Swiss watch – exquisitely intact.
We follow Henry and Annie’s relationship trajectory. Or rather, Henry’s feelings about it. As the playwright, he gets the only good lines. The others feel like bit players, even Annie, who is a foil for illuminating Henry’s thoughts.
Not every performance glows, and you never quite believe in any of these relationships, although McArdle makes his character believable and sympathetic, despite Henry’s incredible pomposity. For the most part, it is (literally and metaphorically) the play that does the talking, and surprisingly deftly.
Artfully directed by Max Webster, with wonderful long-shadowed lighting by Richard Howell and a poppy soundtrack, the drama’s artifice is playfully exposed, maybe even sent up, with dancing stagehands bringing choreographed comedy and a light meta touch.
A storyline involving Brodie (Jack Ambrose), a squaddie who becomes Annie’s cause célèbre after vandalising a wreath on the Cenotaph, is not what it first seems, either. He brings not only another play within this one but opens up inquiries around writing as a form of protest, and perhaps unintentionally exposes the play’s middle-class attitudes in how Brodie is depicted.
There is an unresolved tension around class as a whole, with a blurry line between these characters’ snobberies and the play’s middle-class microaggressions (its “comedy” around regional accents is desperately strained and Brodie is a crass stereotype). Peter McKintosh’s drawing-room set design could either be the backdrop of a comedy of manners, satirising these snobs, or a profound relationship drama – or both.
Many questions are asked of writing: is political art of less value than beautifully constructed art? Is writing about having something to say, or saying something well? These ideas still feel live and current, although they are delivered, thuddingly, in mansplaining lectures from Henry to Annie (“Shut up and listen,” he says).
Henry is trying, and failing, to write a play about his love for Annie over the course of the drama we watch. He talks about it anyway, and his version of love that strives to be unconditional is delicately and earnestly evoked. Attraction is like a “raised blind” in a room, and carnality is not flesh-bound but “knowing and being known … knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh”. It is only at the end that it dawns on you that he might have pulled off the failed play, and that “this” is it.
In one weary line about the fate of an artist’s career, Henry speaks about how people always “prefer the early stuff”. He could be speaking for Stoppard and this gem.
• At the Old Vic, London, until 26 October
