Daily Mail

FOX IN NEED OF A BRUSH UP

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The Real Thing (Theatre Royal, Bath)

Verdict: Polished production; under-par star DESPITE a weak central performanc­e from Laurence Fox (pictured), Sir Tom Stoppard’s 1982 adultery play remains watchable in a sleek staging at Bath’s Theatre Royal.

Mr Fox plays a supposedly self-confident playwright, Henry, who steals another man’s wife and has firm views on life. This is South London in the early Eighties, pre-mobile phones, pre-internet, when we still listened to LPs, drank Buck’s Fizz on Sunday mornings and divorce rates soared.

Henry cynically leaves his wife Charlotte for the slinkier Annie (Flora Spencer-Longhurst), who is married to his friend Max.

Annie and Henry seem untroubled by guilt at their betrayal. Talking of which, the tone is similar to Pinter’s slightly earlier Betrayal; same hermetic, metropolit­an middle-class. Elitist Henry corrects other people’s grammar but shrugs off his own hypocrisie­s (he denounces bad writing even while knocking out trashy TV scripts to pay his maintenanc­e). Here is a worldly swine. Yet Mr Fox mumbles. He repeatedly fails to hit his final consonants: ‘world’ without a ‘d’; ‘bowl’ without an ‘l’, ‘indulgent’ with no ‘t’. It’s like listening to Rio Ferdinand. Director Stephen Unwin should have demanded far greater involvemen­t from his star and made him do away with his modern quiff. The period of this play is important. So is class awareness, another weakness here. But Rebecca Johnson and Adam Jackson-Smith are good as the spurned spouses and Jonathan Fensom’s set is as handsome as a five-star hotel.

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