The Real Thing

“Director Gary Griffin’s production at Court Theatre of this very tricky work has a great deal of visual and verbal panache… Chief among the articulators is Edmund Davys, new to Chicago, who portrays Henry, all at once, as brilliant, snobbish, befuddled and bedeviled. Kate Collins, as his alluring wife, and Barbara Robertson, as his vivacious ex, are equally skilled in scoring their points in the verbal games; and Ned Schmidtke offers a lovely, quite touching study as an actor who is all suaveness on stage and all thumbs in real life. They convince you that this is indeed the real thing.” -Chicago Tribune

Tom Stoppard’s razor-sharp wit burns with passion in this deeply layered play about the overwhelming struggle of finding and knowing love. More than faintly autobiographical, the play’s repressed but magnetic hero, Henry, is a playwright of intellectual prowess who doesn’t know how to write about this thing called love. Mr. Stoppard’s most emotionally-charged play exposes two raw and private souls that become one, despite the distance in their public postures.