Love Devalued, Love Redeemed - Essay

Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing and Patrick Marber's Closer, written fifteen years later, have much in common. The plays are structured in two acts and twelve scenes. Both feature two principal couples who exchange partners, one of whom is a writer; the characters frequently lie, cheat and make false assumptions about one another; meta-literary and self-reflexive techniques are often used to endow both works with additional depth. The Real Thing and Closer are also both set in London. Although the plays share the same urban setting, the backdrop of the city is utilized in different ways, and with a very different effect.

            Closer is set almost entirely in public spaces. Alice, Dan, Larry and Anna move between a hospital, an aquarium, a gallery and a museum, a restaurant and a public park. In all of these, of course, privacy is out of the question. When the characters are situated in locations inaccessible to other people, however, these are rarely cozy, domestic surroundings, and in fact are marked by the past presence of many other individuals therein. Such, for instance, is the case with Larry's surgery in Scene Ten and Dan and Alice's hotel room in Scene Eleven. Even though nobody else in the play world has access to them in their room, they are not at home in these settings – the hotel is merely temporary accommodation, and the clinic is a professional space, and are both frequented principally by strangers. Similarly, Scene Ten takes place in one of six "Paradise Suites" in Alice's strip club, which Larry presumes to be private but in fact is closely watched by the club's security force. Whether extras are present onstage or not, the plurality of public locale creates the impression of a complete city, in which the four principal actors are only part of a broader scheme. The rapid transitions from space to public space suggest the hurriedness, fragmentation and alienating disorientation so characteristic of modern life. Only one scene takes place in a home – Larry and Anna's newlywed flat – and their stay there, too, is short-lived.

            The second scene takes place in Anna's studio. Although ostensibly isolated from the external world, here too privacy is soon broken by the actions of the room's two initial occupants, Anna and Dan, as well as their dialogue. Anna is photographing Dan, and is busy with the mechanism of the camera, constantly taking shots and adjusting the lighting. And, although she has to look at him in order to take pictures, she does so through the mediation of a lens. Thus, Anna is removed from Dan – her occupation requires objectifying him through the medium of photography. The sense of alienation is amplified as they discuss Dan's book, whose subject is his girlfriend Alice. Alice for this purpose also became objectified, this time through the medium of literature. Any remaining illusion of privacy is thoroughly shattered when it becomes apparent that Alice has heard Dan and Anna's romantic exchange through the walls of the studio.

            Unforgettable Scene Three takes place over the Internet. Here too, the illusion of discretion is repeatedly shattered. Larry and Dan, each sitting on one side of a split stage, are alone in their hospital office and at a desk, respectively. The internet, however, like photography and literature in the prior scene, allows for effective and drastic impersonality. It allows for so dramatic a gap between reality and appearances that Dan manages to bring a thoroughly hoodwinked Larry to place a hand down his pants as he pretends to be a lewd, obscene version of Anna online. The sense of privacy is further destroyed by the ringing of the phone in Larry's office, and his clinical, professional response – "What's the histology? Progressive? Sounds like an atrophy" (23) – which brings the outside world rudely into the two men's very private-themed exchange.

            The estrangement and impersonality that saturates the characters' surroundings is reflected in their romantic philosophy and the manner in which they came to be together. Alice was attracted to Dan based on a mistaken assumption: she looked through his bag and was endeared by his sandwich which had the crusts cut off. The crusts, Dan later confesses, broke off the bread by accident. Similarly, Larry and Anna end up marrying after Dan randomly picks him to be the subject of the practical joke he plays on Anna. The four seem to be governed by the random chaotic movements of bodies in the big city; and without much conviction, they remain together as though by default. No reasons or motives are given for much of the passion in the play. Dan and Anna kiss within minutes of meeting, and Dan declares, "You've ruined my life" (17). The first words out of Larry's mouth in the strip club, to Alice, are "I love you". Love has become, in the world of Closer, inflated and consequently devalued. The expression of feelings is thrown about inconsequentially and offhandedly, wielded as a strategic weapon to attain sexual attention rather than professed sincerely at the culmination of a courtship.

            Just as randomly and impurely motivated as the characters come together, the setting of the city allows them to drift apart. The public spaces which served as interaction grounds for the four principals, unresistingly releases them. Anna, Larry, Dan and Alice become unattached individuals once more, easily swallowed by great impersonal London. At the very end of the final scene, the four part ways. Alice is dead, but the difference is hardly felt. The remaining characters feel very little regret as they each exit the stage in a different direction, alone. There is an uneasy sense of contingency, as if all that has transpired onstage could have happened to any four people, or gone a hundred different ways, inconsequentially.

            Public spaces exist in The Real Thing, too, and in this play they serve a similar function as they do in Closer. The first scene is set in what appears to be a living room, but turns out to be the stage of a play. In this first scene, Max and Charlotte's intimacy turns out to be false, in a manner reminiscent of Larry's and Dan's internet intimacy or the unseen security observers at Alice's strip club. Similarly, Scene Ten is set in a train that is actually a TV studio. In Scene Six, Annie and Billy are on a real train, temporarily "completely alone" (Billy, 35) but of course anyone may enter at any time. In Scene Four, Annie and Henry live together in a transient space, a makeshift living room that they will soon leave behind.

The characters' uncertainty and lack of control in public or temporary spaces are apparent. On the train, as they rehearse their parts on the train for Brodie's screenplay, Annie "looks around nervously" as Billy rips his shirt open (59). The first scene too, with its deceitful play-within-a-play, foreshadows many of The Real Thing's unhappy events. Henry, for instance, will suspect Annie of cheating on him in the same way Max's character suspected of Charlotte's. The stage directions of scene three specify that "the disposition of furniture and makes the scene immediately reminiscent of the beginning of Scene I", which indicates that Annie and Henry will experience similar discord in their relationship as the play-within-a-play's fictional characters have.

Whereas the majority of Closer takes place in public locations, allowing alienation to saturate the play's action, most of The Real Thing is dominated by domestic spaces. Seven of its twelve scenes occur in a proper living room, Max's and Annie's, Charlotte and Henry's or Henry's and Annie's. The living rooms are often described in the stage directions as having several doors, often closed. Such stage architecture creates a sense of secure enclosure: the home is the center of the action. Characters exit through various doors to the outside world or to less central rooms in the house, but even though they come and go, they ultimately return to the domestic core. Max, Annie, Charlotte and Henry, as well as Billy, do not seem to randomly drift in space. They are much more seriously committed, and breaking up relationships is accompanied by regret: Annie's remark that "it's only a couple of marriages and a child" is clearly ironic (28). The goings-on in the various homes are far from idyllic; couples fight, cheat, make false accusations and lie to one another. Often, this creates a sense of entrapment and claustrophobia, but for better or for worse, each of the characters in the play belongs to a home.

As opposed to Closer, in which characters change partners without rhyme or reason, in The Real Thing there does, in fact, seem to be a quest for "the real thing". Just as echoes of the city were evident in the philosophy of love in Closer, the dominance of the domestic is evident in The Real Thing's philosophy. Henry's repetitive profession of love to Annie in Scene Two seems to be sincere. Once the two make the weighty decision of breaking apart their families, they stay together, even though Henry is gravely troubled by Annie's various infidelities ("dignified cuckoldry is a difficult trick, but it can be done" (Henry, 75)). Henry despises Brodie's anti-intellectual attitude toward politics and writing, and resents Annie's involvement with Brodie, and yet he adopts as Annie's system of values for his own, telling her that "what you do is right. What you want is right … I love you" (76). When Henry and Charlotte's daughter Debbie shares her "free love" attitude to romance with Henry, he is deeply disturbed, tells her it is "persuasive nonsense" (63) and cautions her against sophistry.

The characters of The Real Thing, like those of Closer, admit jadedness, but unlike them, love has not lost its magical appeal. "In pairs we insist that we five ourselves to each other. What selves? What's left? What else is there that hasn't been dealt out like a deck of cards? A sort of knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that". Monogamy, marital faithfulness and honesty are not inviolable, but Henry, as do the other lovers in the play, it seems, do hold love sacred. And so the home, the room with its doors that shut out the outside world triumph over great, impersonal London, and for the characters of The Real Thing, it is ultimately not estrangement, but love, that lives on.

Works Cited

Unfortunately I don't have the details of the following:

Patrick Marber. Closer. Class text.

Tom Stoppard. The Real Thing. Class text.