“Well, what do you think?” said the woman to my right. “Did she have it off or didn’t she?” I put some sugar in my coffee and said I thought she probably hadn’t.
We were discussing the new Tom Stoppard play. Since The Real Thing opened here in January at the Plymouth Theater I have had a number of animated conversations about Henry and Annie’s marriage, Henry being the hero of The Real Thing (Jeremy Irons) and Annie (Glenn Close) the wife who is giving him such a hard time. That Glenn Close is “being unfaithful” to Jeremy Irons in some capacity is never really in question in these debates: the issue is simply whether or not she actually commits adultery. The play leaves it ambiguous.
The playwright husband and his actress wife have quarreled twice: once (early on) about jealousy, a feeling that Henry seems never to experience, to Annie’s annoyance, and later over a bad play that Annie wants her husband to rescue and rewrite because it was written in a good cause. Henry, not convinced of the merits of the cause and feeling anyway that good intentions do not redeem bad literature, refuses. Annie, when next seen, is doing a stint of provincial theater up north and rebuffing the attentions of a pretty young actor named Billy, who has no higher opinion of the bad play than Henry, but no objections to acting in it if doing so will keep him near Annie. When Annie returns to
