The Real Thing

Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play, this enduring and highly acclaimed dramatic work "brings head and heart, life and art together in an exhilarating way". (San Francisco Chronicle)

The Real Thing begins with Max and Charlotte, a couple whose marriage is on the verge of collapse. Charlotte is an actress who has been appearing in a play about marriage written by her husband, Henry. Max, her leading man, is also married to an actress, Annie. Both marriages are at the point of rupture because Henry and Annie have fallen in love. But is it the real thing?

Tom Stoppard combines his characteristically brilliant wordplay and wit with flashes of insight that illuminate the nature—and the mystery—of love, creating a multi-toned play that challenges the mind while searching out the innermost secrets of the heart.

The Real Thing is brilliant and heartfelt, an extraordinary theatrical exploration of marriage, fidelity, and the creative life.

Tom Stoppard was born "Tomás Straüssler" in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937 and moved to England with his family in 1946. Catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967, he has become recognized as a contemporary comic master, the brilliantly acclaimed author of The Real Inspector Hound, Enter a Free Man, Albert's Bridge, After Magritte, Travesties, Dirty Linen, Jumpers, New-Found-Land, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Artist Descending a Staircase, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), and Rock 'n' Roll. He has also written a number of screenplays, including The Romantic Englishwoman, Despair, and Brazil. In 2017, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature.