Hugo Weaving, The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard
 

n.  The Real Thing ~ Tom Stoppard  (2003)

A Sydney Theatre Company production
Character: Henry ~ charming, pedantic playwright; idealistic romantic
Cast: Hugo Weaving    Henry, Angie Milliken  Annie,  Heather Mitchell   Charlotte, Andrew Tighe    Max, Alexander Jenkins Billy, Jaime Mears Debbie,Joshua Rosenthal  Brodie  Dir: Robyn Nevin   Set Design: Brian Thomson
Costume Design: Fiona Crombie
Theatrical run: October 18-December 14, 2003 at the STC's Wharf  I.
 

Hugo Weaving: The Real Thing Plot/Comments:

This is Stoppard on top form. Although it was originally viewed in 1982 as a rather lightweight autobiography, this unashamedly romantic, funny, painful exploration of relationships has weathered well, with recent high-profile revivals in the West End, Broadway and Sydney bringing it a new critical recognition.

In typical reality-bending style, the play manipulates the audience by opening with Max, a playwright writing about infidelity, sulking and suspicious about his wife's fidelity while she has been abroad. On her return, he eventually points out that he found her passport, making her apparent trip seem rather unfeasible. By the end of the scene she has left him, holiday suitcase in hand.
 

The Real Thing Gallery
The Real Thing Classic Scenes
Back:  After the Deluge
Previous Play: The White Devil 
Web Weaving
 
 

Typical Hugo Weaving Quotes:

 
  • "I feel reckless, extravagant, famous, in love, and I'm next week's castaway on Desert Island Discs"
  • "I'm supposed to be one of your intellectual playwrights. I'm going to look a total prick, aren't I, announcing that while I was telling Jean-Paul Satre and the post-war French existentialists where they had got it wrong, I was spending the whole time listening to the Crystals singing 'Da Doo Ron Ron'."
  • "Actors are so sensitive. They feel neglected if one isn't constantly checking up on them"
  • "I told her once that lots of women were only good for fetching drinks, and she became quite unreasonable" Blithely, knowing what he is doing, holding his empty glass towards Charlotte. "Is there any more of that?"
  • In response to the vegetables Annie has brought over instead of flowers . "So original. I'll get a vase"                                       Annie: "It's supposed to be crudités"                                   Henry: "Crudités! Perfect title for a pornographic revue"
  • On cheesy pop music: "It moves me, the way people are supposed to be moved by real music. I was taken once to Convent Garden to hear a woman called Callas in a sort of foreign musical with no dancing which people were donating kidneys to get tickets for... Not even close. That woman would have had a job getting into the top thirty if she was hyped."
  • On managing sex with a sleeping Annie: "You were totally zonked. Only your reflexes were working…I thought I'd try it without you talking"
  • "I don't know how to write love. I try to write it properly, and it just comes out embarrassing. It's either childish or it's rude. And the rude bits are absolutely juvenile."
  • "I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover. Only two kinds of presence in the world. There's you and there's them. I love you so"
  • "It's classy stuff, Webster. I love all that Jacobean sex and violence"
  • Knocking some literary sense into Annie: "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?"
  • "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"
  • "It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst. Is that romantic? Well, good. Everything should be romantic.  Love, work, music, literature, virginity, loss of virginity…"
  • "You can't put things back. They won't go back. Talk to me. I'm your chap. I know about this. We start off like one of those caterpillars designed for a particular leaf. The exclusive voracity of love. And then not."
  • See Classic Scenes for Stoppard's excellent monologues
Hugo Weaving, Tom Stoppard, Angie Milliken, The Real Thing, Rehearsals

Comments

  • As in the stageplay, music played an important part in the STC production, though unlike most previous productions, the stage design went for the unusual route of making a towering house of cards its main feature.
  • Tom Stoppard is writing the screenplay for a film adaptation of Philip Pullman's stunning His Dark Materials novels. With his combination of intensity, rugged vulnerability, physicality and exclusive educational background, Hugo Weaving would make a fantastic choice as Lord Asriel, absentee father to the books' heroine, obsessed with bringing down the powers of God himself.
  • Stoppard tried for years to get a film of The Real Thing off the ground, without success, in the early 80s. 
  • Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company and director of The Real Thing, Robyn Nevin  worked with Hugo Weaving on You Can't Take it With You, A Map of the World and Macbeth when he left NIDA, and also in 1983's The Perfectionist. Later, she had a small part in the Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions as Counsillor Dillard. Angie Miliken was the voracious Vittoria in The White Devil (set design also by Brian Thomson, who also designed for Arcadia). Heather Mitchell,  was in The White Devil, The Secret Rapture, The Cherry Orchard, As You Desire Me, Macbeth, You Can't Take it With You, Bodyline, Henry IV (part one), Ring Around the Moon, Seven Deadly Sins ~ Lust, and in Proof as Martin's mother in the flashback sequences. Joshua Rosenthal was in Bordertown. Andrew Tighe was in Arcadia and Private Lives. See The Usual Suspectsfor a huge list of frequent Weaving co-workers.


Very special thanks to Tamaki for the donation of the promotional material.
Hugo Weaving, The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard, promo
 
This scene is from a tepidly-received play by Henry (Hugo Weaving); the players being his acid-tongued wife Charlotte, and Max, an unassuming actor married to Annie (Angie Milliken), another actress.
       We then switch to a vicious scene of Noel Cowardesque brutal domesticity between Henry and Charlotte, with hapless guest Max (and later Annie) as their audience. 
     While Charlotte verbally stabs him to try and get some kind of emotional reaction, Henry effortlessly counters her barbed remarks with professionally witty putdowns. He is far more absorbed in the dilemma of deciding his 'desert island' records for a radio interview: he needs a façade of intellectual musical choices to hide his unashamedly brainless 50s and 60s pop, and his tin ear -- he is a Serious Playwright and has appearances to keep up. 
 
Naturally, things are not going to be as straightforward as simple domestic rivalry. As Charlotte and Max go into the kitchen, we find that Henry and Annie are utterly love, with her plea of "Come on, touch me. Help yourself. Touch me anywhere you like," made to the sound of their unknowing spouses chopping vegetables. 
As partners change and time goes on, The Real Thing gathers Stoppardian momentum with recurring dramatic techniques and language, parallels between fiction and reality, and inventive echoes of previous scenes.
The question here is whether the mythical Real Thing of an honest, unmanipulative, equal, exclusive, fraternal, romantic and sexual love is possible. And the answer is…yes. Sort of.
Hugo Weaving, Tom Stoppard, Angie Milliken, The Real Thing, lean
 
Robyn Nevin's production for the Sydney Theatre Company opened to superb reviews for the play in general and Hugo Weaving in particular. Many performances were booked out weeks in advance and on opening, tickets were in such demand that it became nearly impossible to see it on weekends (due in no small part to Weaving's triple that year of  After the Deluge , the Matrixsequels and The Return of the King).
 
There was far more to Hugo Weaving's Henry than an artfully muddled professional wit: he was also warm, honest, mischievous and loving; his performance showing excellent comic timing, great physical energy and incredible personal presence.
    Weaving's frequently-noted talent for language brought to life Henry's many fast-paced monologues (see Classic Scenes ) and superb one-liners, with co-star Milliken noting, "He has a great facility with language, I really enjoy working with him. It's hard to imagine anyone better suited to the part. I think it has to do with his sensibility and knowledge of himself. Henry knows his flaws and so does Hugo."
Hugo Weaving, Tom Stoppard, Angie Milliken, The Real Thing, Rehearsal
 
 
 

"The performances from the three leads are wonderful. Weaving is irrepressibly dynamic; an impish, grinning physical explosion of comic charm and banter. It's supremely confident and exhilarating acting, grounded in some very real and effective emotion as the play develops".
~ The Sydney Morning Herald
.
 
The Real Thing is a rare event: an incredibly clever play which is unashamedly romantic on a very real and truthful level; one of those times that you'll leave a little more in love with your partner than when you went in.
Hugo Weaving, 2003, interview for The Real Thing
 

Hugo Weaving content: 


Coming at the end of a hectic year of monotonous and draining promotional duties for the Matrix sequels, Hugo Weaving's three year stage absence hid a near-constant involvement with either Agent Smith or Elrond (training, rehearsing, re/shooting, or doing the 'grin and grip' of publicity). 
       Unsurprisingly, he admitted in an interview for The Real Thing, "In a way, I've had enough of those two films", and his relief at coming back to live performance and a real audience was evident: "I don't want to let it go."
 
His second Stoppard character (he was arrogant Brit Benedict Nightingale in the STC's Arcadia), Henry has the unique hook of being an apparently autobiographical portrayal of the writer himself.
    "Yes, he's Stoppard," Weaving said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. "But then again, he's not. It's me finding that character and one of the best ways of finding the character is to understand Stoppard himself."
    He had previously met the mercurial playwright during rehearsals for Arcadia in 1994. "I had expected to meet someone who was witty and cold but my memory is of an incredibly warm man, always chatting and hugging and inviting us for drinks. He was very generous and very positive. I think he had come under some criticism for being witty, brilliant and sophisticated, but maybe he didn't really have a heart. When he was writing this play he was trying to simplify things, trying to express some of the fundamental ideas about what love is, what life is.
   "I think this play was a turning point in his career. He was finding a way to express feelings that perhaps he hadn't done before."
Hugo Weaving, The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard, cricket
 
The Sydney Morning Herald noticed that in Hugo Weaving's portrayal of Henry, "armed with wit, cynicism and a pen, he is not unlike an older, worldlier version of Will Shakespeare in Stoppard's Oscar-winning screenplay, Shakespeare in Love. Henry is charming, pedantic and idealistic. Despite his profile, Weaving is renowned for being honest, unapologetic and unaffected. He writes, too, [admitting] to having an embryonic film script up his sleeve".
Hugo Weaving, Tom Stoppard, Angie Milliken, The Real Thing, cards