After 25 years, Tom Stoppard's remarkable play "The Real Thing" still raises vital questions about the way we argue for political and social reform

The "cricket bat scene" with Albert Schultz
and Megan Follows in Toronto last year

"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve . . . respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead."
--Henry, a playwright, in the opening scene of Act II of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing

Yesterday in an e-mail a friend expressed her enormous enthusiasm for Tom Stoppard (seen here in New York in June collecting the Tony for Best Play for his trilogy The Coast of Utopia), and that set me to thinking about the work of his that I know best, the earlier plays. In particular I found myself reimmersed in his remarkable play The Real Thing (1982, first done on Broadway in 1984).

I confess that at some point while I was responding to my friend's e-mail it occurred to me that the issues Henry engages in what I think of as the "cricket bat scene" (for reasons that should become apparent) are so important to us would-be political reformers that I wanted to share these same thoughts with you out there. So that's what I'm going to do, in pretty much the form that I sent them off last night. (I confessed my shamelessness to my friend, who said to go right ahead.)

When I dug out the play, which I hadn't looked at in a long time (and was startled to find in exactly the expected place on the shelf, despite all those years and a couple of moves), I found myself as overwhelmed by it as ever--and the issues joined as urgent. So today I dutifully typed out some excerpts from the "cricket bat scene," which follow the e-mail:

You don't have to sell me on Stoppard. I loved the early plays, and then, back when I was taking acting classes (not to become an actor, heaven help us all, but for some first-hand experience of the performance process, for my critical writing), one of my teachers was excited by Mike Nichols' Broadway staging of THE REAL THING, and when my new scene partner and I needed a scene to work on, she suggested the scene with the "cricket bat" speech. We spent a number of weeks on it; the material was just remarkable.

Poor Henry is fighting simultaneously for his (significantly younger) wife and his life as Annie is preparing to leave him for her fiery young Scottish revolutionary asshole. [This is actually wrong. Oh, Annie is ready to break up with Henry all right, but when he eventually accuses her of being interested in Brodie, it seems clear that he's wrong. It's only Brodie's radical spirit that has gotten to her. However, the young actor who's playing a Brodie-like character in Brodie's play is another matter.] He tries to make her understand the fatuity of the revolutionary rhetoric--you don't change societies that way. And in his desperation he comes up with the analogy of the cricket bat: how difficult it is to hit the ball, and how little impact you will make most of the time, but how every once in a while, if you really get the bat on the ball, really hit it, you can producing an amazing result. Same thing with the fixing the ills of the world, Henry tries to argue--if everything goes right, you may just NUDGE it a bit, and that's the best you can hope for. [Again, this isn't quite right, as you'll see, but the spirit is sort of right.]

Of course this is only Henry's point of view, and it's always dangerous to confuse a character's point of view with the author's. But I have to say, he's awfully persuasive--though not to Annie, of course. Its applicability to the sphere of political reform, especially when you consider the massed power of the forces arrayed AGAINST change, is kind of scary.

Now, as to the scene itself, of course we won't be doing anything like justice to it, but I think there is still some value to looking at these selected excerpts.

I won't burden you with excessive plot. What you need to know is that after two years together, "40-ish" Henry, a successful playwright who's sliding into a well repressed midlife crisis of self-doubt, and "30-ish" Annie, a popular actress, have sunk into a crisis point in their relationship. The immediate battleground is a dreadful play written by a young Scottish anti-capitalist radical Annie has championed, which she actually plans to travel to Glasgow to appear in. She's gotten Henry to read it, with a view to perhaps fixing it a bit. Let's pick up, oh, here:

ANNIE: To you, he can't write. To him, write is all you can do.

HENRY: Jesus, Annie, you're beginning to appal me. There's something scary about stupidity made coherent. I can deal with idiots, and I can deal with sensible argument, but I don't know how to deal with you. Where's my cricket bat?

ANNIE: Your cricket bat?

HENRY: Yes, it's a new approach.

(He heads out into the hall.)

ANNIE: Are you trying to be funny?

HENRY: No, I'm serious.

(He goes out while she watches in wary disbelief. He returns with an old cricket bat.)

ANNIE: You better not be.

HENRY: Right, you silly cow--

ANNIE: Don't you bloody dare--

HENRY: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly . . . (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might . . . travel . . . (He clcks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting 'Ouch!' with your hands stuck into your armpits. (Indicating the cricket bat.) This isn't better because someone says it's better, or because there's a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It's better because it's better. You don't believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on. (From the script.) 'You're a strange boy, Billy, how old are you?' 'Twenty, but I've lived more than you'll ever live.' Ooh, ouch!

(He drops the script and hops about with his hands in his armpits, going 'Ouch!' ANNIE watches him expressionlessly until he desists.)

ANNIE: I hate you.

HENRY: I love you. I'm your pal. I'm your best mate. I look after you. You're the only chap.

Of course Annie knows that the script isn't very good. But can't Henry perhaps "cut it and shape it"? ("Cut it and shape it," he says. "Henry of Mayfair.") The problem, Henry says, isn't just that Brodie can't write, but that it's all "balls."

HENRY: When he gets into his stride, announcing every stale revelation of the newly enlightened, like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific--war is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft . . . It's all here: the Stock Exchange, the arms dealers, the press barons . . . You can't fool Brodie--patriotism is propaganda, religion is a con trick, royalty is an anachronism . . . Pages and pages of it. It's like being run over slowly by a traveling freak show of favourite simpletons, the india rubber pedagogue, the midget intellectual, the human panacea . . .

ANNIE: It's his view of the world. Perhaps from where he's standing, you'd see it the same way.

HENRY: Or perhaps I'd realize where I'm standing. Or at least that I'm standing somewhere.

Henry argues that when it comes to abstractions like politics, justice, and patriotism, unlike a real object like a coffee mug,

there's nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So if you try to change them as though there were something there to change, you'll get frustrated, and frustration will finally make you violent. If you know this and proceed with humility, you may perhaps alter people's perceptions so that they behave a little differently at that axis where we locate politics or justice; but if you don't know this, then you're acting on a mistake. Prejudice is the expression of this mistake.

And it doesn't matter, Annie asks, "who wrote it, why he wrote it, where he wrote it"?

HENRY: They don't matter. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn't. I don't know. It doesn't count. He's a lout with language. I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech . . . Words don't deseve that kind of malarkey. They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good anymore, and Brodie knocks corners off without knowing he's doing it. So everything he builds is jerry-built. It's rubbish. An intelligent child could push it over. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Now I don't say we have to agree with Henry, or at least not all the way. But then, this isn't a polemic, not a Socratic dialogue, it's a play. And if it hasn't yet been driven home to the audience that Henry is fighting for his life, for something to hold on to, the depth of his despair is about the become obvious. Annie fights back with the weapons at her disposal. This follows immediately from those last words of Henry's:

(ANNIE goes to the typewriter, pulls out the page from the machine and reads it.)

ANNIE: 'Seventy-nine. Interior. Commander's capsule. From Zadok's p.o.v. we see the green glow of he laser strike-force turning towards us. BCU Zadok's grim smile. Zadok: "I think it's going to work. Here they come!" Kronk, voice over: "Hold your course!" Zadok:--'

HENRY: That not words, that's pictures. The movies. Anyway, alimony doesn't count. If Charlotte [Henry's ex-wife] made it legal with that architect she's shacked up with, I'd be writing the real stuff.

(ANNIE lets the page drop on to the typewriter.)

And now Annie drives the stake in. Every time I read this exchange, I'm overwhelmed by the incredible pain it involves, in different ways, for both Annie and Henry. Back when their relationship was new and thrilling, and all things seemed possible, Henry promised to write Annie a play worthy of her acting talents. Now, again we proceed without interruption, from Henry saying that if he were relieved of his alimony burden he'd "be writing the real stuff."

ANNIE: You never wrote mine.

HENRY: That's true. I didn't. I tried.
I can't remember when I last felt so depressed.
Oh yes. Yesterday.

That's not the end of the scene, which is even more depressing, but I'll leave that to you to deal with. I do want to add a postscript, though.

Naturally while I was working on the scene for class I didn't want to see the play. But when we'd had our fun with it, of course I did. And I hated it.

Not the play, which I knew too well to disparage. I loved that play--and returning to it now I'm just as amazed and excited by it. However, the performance I saw was so slick, and seemed so unconcerned with the burning inner urgencies of these characters, that if I hadn't already known the play fairly well, I don't think I would have picked up on its remarkable qualities.

Of course Jeremy Irons was and is a brilliant actor, and I suppose he and director Mike Nichols could justify his imperturbability as Henry--laconic to the point of emotional absence--as the character's own fortress-like repression. I suppose this is a defensible choice in human terms, but in dramatic terms it seems to me a catastrophically wrong choice for communicating the lives of these people at this particular point in time. I would have thought that the whole point of Henry's participation in the play is that his accumulated as well as immediate life circumstances are bringing his entire life crashing down around him. He's fighting for everything he believes in, fighting in effect for his continued existence.

And Laila Robbins, who had succeeded Glenn Close as Annie, and who I later learned is an actress of considerable sympathy and flexibility, and can give us vulnerability as well as strength, seemed stuck in two dimensions, communicating hardly any sense of the character's stake in escaping Henry's engraved-in-marble world of impeccable good sense in favor of the reckless excitement of youthful man-the-barricades idealism.

Of course this was well into the play's New York run, and it's possible that the production had succumbed to the old plague of eight-performances-a-week routine. But it sure had the look of a production that was designed to use a bag of special-effects tricks to sell a play that's built in good part on the power of carefully and meaningfully crafted words.

In my battered old copy Real Thing, I was startled to discover that in London the role of Henry was created by Roger Rees, who I can imagine being even icier than Jeremy Irons. But the original Annie was that most irresistibly warm and involving of actresses, Felicity Kendal. Man, I'd have loved to see that!

#

Annals of technology: 22 CDs' worth of Stravinsky by Stravinsky for under $2 a disk if you shop right; plus a hybrid (1961+1967+2005) "Soldier's Tale"

"It is all changed," Stravinsky was told, and "indeed it was."

It's the story I always think of when I think of Igor Stravinsky. As the composer told it, it displayed not just his prickly "don't mess with me" side, but also his waspish sense of humor.

He was recalling, 20 years after the fact, his "participation" in Walt Disney's Fantasia, a segment of which was bult around his revolutionary score for Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). It's well-known that the 1913 Paris premiere of Le Sacre, by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, precipitated a full-fledged riot. It's also well-established that Stravinsky's shockingly brutal yet rivetingly beautiful score changed the course of 20th-century Western music.

Most observers thought it was pretty radical of Disney and his musical advisers to fix on Stravinsky's score (even today it remains startling, or should), which after all dramatized the sacrifice of a virgin to pagan gods. Disney and his people somehow got the idea that the music provided a fitting sonic image for the birth of the universe, and the formation of the earth, and eventually the dawn of tyrannosaurus rex. (Here you can see some of the dinosaurs romping.)

Now, Fantasia had some legitimate classical bona fides, starting with the enthusiastic participation of conductor Leopold Stokowski, who recorded the musical selections with his Philadelphia Orchestra in a revolutionary new (for 1939!) multichannel format.

Stravinsky told the story of his involvement with Fantasia in the course of his recorded "Apropos of Le Sacre," included as a single-sided bonus LP in Columbia Masterworks' lavish Stravinsky Conducts 1960 box, which contained brand-new recordings of Le Sacre and the ballet he wrote just before it, Petrushka (1911).

[No, I didn't transcribe Stravinsky's talk myself. I just typed it from the printed version that was included among the tiny-type but nevertheless extensive liner notes that accompanied one of the great record releases of all time: Columbia Masterworks' reissue, in a bargain-priced box (three LPs for the price of two), of the 1960 Petrushka and Sacre along with Stravinsky's 1961 recording of the complete Firebird (1910)--the three great ballets written in collaboration with Diaghilev which defined and propelled Stravinsky's international career. (Generous Columbia followed this up with another indispensable box, also three LPs for the price of two, containing the ballets Apollo and Orpheus and the complete Fairy's Kiss and Pulcinella.)

[Here is Stravinsky at 82 conducting London's New Philharmonia Orchestra in the "Lullaby"--with the famous bassoon solo--and rousing "Final Hymn" that conclude the Firebird Suite.]

Anyway, here is Stravinsky telling the story:

In 1937 or 1938 I received a request from the Disney office in America for permission to use Le Sacre in a cartoon film. The request was accompanied by a gentle warning that if permission were withheld the music would be used anyway. (Le Sacre, being "Russian," was not copyrighted in the United States), but as the owners of the film wished to show it abroad (i.e., in Berne Copyright countries) they offered me $5,000, a sum I was obliged to accept (though, in fact, the "percentages" of a dozen crapulous intermediaries reduced it to $1,200).

I saw the film with George Balanchine in a Hollywood studio at Christmastime 1939. I remember someone offering me a score, and, when I said I had my own, the someone saying "But it is all changed."

It was indeed. The order of the pieces had been shuffled and the most difficult of them eliminated--though this didn't help the musical performance, which was execrable. I will say nothing about the visual complement (for I do not wish to criticize an unresisting imbecility), but the musical point of view of the film involved a dangerous misunderstanding.

So tell us, Igor, and don't pull any punches, how'd you like Fantasia?

I really want to talk about Stravinsky one of these days, and I plan to get to it really soon. Awhile back I startled Howie by saying that we've already had the last three great composers we're ever going to have--Stravinsky (1882-1971), Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), all now long since safely dead and buried. This seems so obvious to me now that I forget how stark it may sound to others. But these are the last composers who seem to me, through the sheer force of their imagination, to have transcended the exhaustion of the musical language they inherited, or could scrounge up or invent.

I didn't really mean to get into this just now, but in this connection I can't resist throwing in the concluding paragraph of Stravinsky's "Apropos of Le Sacre" talk:

I was guided by no system whatever in Le Sacre du printemps. When I think of the music of the other composers of that time who interest me--Berg's music, which is synthetic (in the best sense), and Webern's, which is analytic--how much more theoretical it seems than Le Sacre. And these composers belonged to and were supported by a great tradition. Very little immediate tradition lies behind Le Sacre du printemps, and no theory. I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.

At the time of this "Apropos," Le Sacre was nearly 50 years old. Stravinsky was still composing actively, and continued to do so more or less up to his death. Over those six decades of composing, he wound up working in an astonishing range of styles and musical languages, but mostly he used the sheer force of his imagination to squeeze every drop he could out of those musical languages available to him.

One of the remarkable aspects of Stravinsky's career is the extensive recorded documentation we have of it. The composer was from fairly early times an active performer of his own music, and began making recordings early on. But the intensive, near-encyclopedic recorded documentation of his works eventually undertaken by Columbia Masterworks was without precedent. It was almost entirely the initiative of the remarkably urbane, deeply cultured man who once upon a time actually ran Columbia Records, Goddard Lieberson [pictured above]. Lieberson also committed the company to extensive recorded documentation of the fine American composer Aaron Copland. (How times have changed!)

In the notes for the Stravinsky Conducts 1960 box, Lieberson himself explained the gap that Stravinsky's recorded "Apropos of Le Sacre" was designed to plug. He paid tribute to the published conversations the composer was then producing with his "valued associate," Robert Craft, which "give us a glimpse of his brilliant, urbane, cultured mind." "Unfortunately," he added,

they do not provide our ears with the wonderful Stravinsky-geneticized language which he has put together out of French, German, English, and Russian-with-immediate-translations. (With French and German, Stravinsky hurtles forward and is imperturbably and aloofly unconcerned with his auditors' linguistic accomplishments, while for a Russian phrase he will provide an English translation as quickly as a U.N. translator.) That, too, we have tried to remedy with the enclosed record of Stravinsky speaking about Le Sacre du printemps.

Columbia/CBS Masterworks and its corporate heir, Sony Classical, have done commendable work gathering the Stravinsky recorded legacy, first on LP and then on CD. Not much incentive was offered to the nonspecialist music lover, though. Now, the current heir to the whole of the catalogs of both Columbia/CBS Masterworks and RCA Victor Red Seal, Sony BMG Masterworks, is importing a 22-CD set produced by German Sony, at a staggeringly low price--the list is $45.98! (I paid $37 for mine, including shipping, but I've noticed the price inching upward.)

At this price, of course, it's unreasonable to expect much in the way of liner notes, a real limitation in the case of the many vocal works included, hard to appreciate fully without printed texts--and also for the many less-known works that become easy to explore in this incredibly handy collection. Well, I would think that anyone who's found his/her way to DWT has the "search" skills to dig up the necessary material online.

Even in the most famous Stravinsky works, which naturally have received vast numbers of recordings, including a fair number of extremely good ones, the composer's own recordings remain, in almost all cases, not only fully competitive, but in some ways the best place for the newcomer to the music to start. Even though I already had a lot of this stuff on LP, I made a point of buying CD editions of the ageless 1960 Stravinsky Petrushka and Le Sacre (conveniently coupled on a CD, which I endorse without reservation to anyone who isn't thinking of buying the set) and Stravinsky's 1964 stereo remake of his only full-length opera, the satirically biting yet also heart-hurting Rake's Progress.

If I could point to one thing about Stravinsky's own performances, it would be rhythm, his unmatched from-the-inside feel for the way the music moves. And if I could offer you a sound clip [maybe someone out there can suggest how I might do that?--K.], I might start with the orchestral fanfare that doesn't so much open as launch The Rake, which has a propulsive, infectious vitality I've never heard anyone else duplicate.

Or I might offer the opening "Soldier's March" from one of my very favorite Stravinsky recordings, the Suite from L'Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale). L'Histoire, written in Switzerland during World War I (1918), is a work of no definable genre. It's a play-with-music in which, as Robert Craft once put it, the music "is the play." It's the shaggiest of shaggy-dog tales, which begins with a violin-playing soldier, en route home to his village on leave, unknowingly selling his soul to the Devil. The amazingly pungent and biting yet often haunting music is scored for the odd, what-he-had-on-hand septet of violin, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, double bass, and percussion.

In February 1961 Columbia assembled seven top-notch players drawn from the unique assortment of musical backgrounds you find in the Los Angeles area, to be the "Columbia Chamber Ensemble" for a composer-conducted recording of the Suite from L'Histoire. With most of the finished product apparently drawn from the final day of recording (it was, it seems, an amazing session), they produced magic. The vivid instrumental textures are so gloriously reproduced that for a long time I made this 1961 L'Histoire Suite a part of my standard "test kit" when I wanted to get an impression of unfamiliar audio equipment.

What hardly anybody seems to have known until a couple of years ago was that in 1967 a new "Columbia Chamber Ensemble," featuring four of the 1961 players including the outstanding violinist Israel Baker, was assembled to record the tiny bits of connective music, adding up to a mere four minutes, needed to produce a complete recording of L'Histoire. (A certain amount of the spoken portion of the play takes place over the musical movements familiar from the suite.)

Nothing more was done with this material, though. It's suggested that the composer himself didn't have any burning desire to produce a complete recording of L'Histoire, perhaps because of a falling out at some point with the librettist, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz.

But, as we learn from William Wernick--executive producer of Sony's "new" complete L'Histoire conducted by the composer [pictured above], 36 years after his death!--once he discovered that the 1967 session took place, since he had a job number to apply to a search, the session tapes were soon found, intact! "All the takes were there," he writes, "and not only that, they were superb both in quality and performance."

The 1961 and 1967 tapes were edited and assembled, leaving just the question of the spoken portion of the play.

By coincidence, we discovered that Academy Award-winnning actor Jeremy Irons had performed The Soldier's Tale at the Old Vic in 2004 in a new English adaptation by the noted writer Jeremy Sams.

Irons agreed to undertake this improbable "collaboration" with the long-departed composer (the now-veteran actor was 22 when Stravinsky died) and the two-headed Columbia Chamber Ensemble. His part, recorded in London in 2005, was duly edited into the hybrid 1961/1967 music tape. You might think the result would be a hopeless hodge-podge. In fact, it sounds to me like the recording of L'Histoire we've been waiting for all these years.

There's no question that Irons is a splendid actor, but a lot of brilliant actors have fallen into the trap of turning L'Histoire into cloying sing-song silliness, and Irons himself is prone to a number of actorish mannerisms that might have been fatal here. Nothing of the sort happened, I'm delighted to report. Performing the entire play as narration--rather than sharing the action with separate actors for the Soldier and the Devil, as is more commonly done--Irons does a simply glorious job, thanks in no small part to the wonder of Sams's English version, which plays better than I've ever heard even the original French text, let alone any other English version.

So, a humble "well done" to everyone involved in this unusual production, which includes exemplary background notes, not least regarding the 1961 recording sessions that are still the heart of this project. A "not so well done" to whoever thought that tacking on the 1966 Robert Craft-conducted Symphonies of Wind Instruments added something to the disk. It's worth having, no doubt, and the piece was written within several years of L'Histoire, but surely some more meaningful filler could have been found?

And a "pathetically badly done" to the Sony BMG Masterworks people who are the embarrassing current guardians of the immense Masterworks and Red Seal legacies. When I went looking online for a photo of the new L'Histoire package, I easily enough found a Sony BMG Masterworks home page with a row of "FEATURE RELEASES" including this one, with a thumbnail photo that gave every evidence of being a link. So I clicked on it, expecting to be taken to a page where the recording was presented/promoted with justified pride.

Instead I landed on a "Sony Music Store" page proclaiming, "Search (no products found)," with the additional information: "Sorry no match available. This is not a Sony Music product. Please select another product."

I can think of several things to say, but for once I'm not going to say any of them.