On Tom Stoppard’s 'The Real Thing'

In Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing a playwright leaves the actress he is married to, who is acting in his play as a wife suspected of cheating on her husband, and goes to live with another actress, who is married to the actor who is playing the guy in the playwright’s play who suspects his wife of cheating on him. Got that?

Nobody ever said affairs of the heart were straightforward. In Stoppard’s tricksy hall of mirrors vision, thrillingly returned to the stage at the Old Vic by Max Webster, they are addictively bewildering.