Special to The Telegram

Tom Stoppard writes very clever plays — and he does so without patronizing his audience.

He expects us to be theatrically sophisticated and prepared to engage with ideas.

The Real Thing is no exception to the rule. The real thing is life, the real thing is art, and the real thing is especially love.

But the trick is to tell the real from the unreal.

The play opens with an architect, Max, discovering that his wife, Charlotte, has been unfaithful to him. The second scene introduces Henry, a rumpled, middle-aged playwright.

When Max comes calling, it emerges that he is an actor, and that the first scene was not the real thing at all but a scene from Henry’s play, with Henry’s wife playing the part of Max’s wife.

But is the second scene any more real than the opening scene, since it, too, is a scene in Stoppard’s play, with real actors representing make-believe theatrical characters?

Further blurring and eliding the boundary between life and illusion, actor-characters are shown importing into their own existential continuum the texts they are rehearsing and performing — the script created by Henry, the autobiographical piece written by the imprisoned Brodie, snatches of Strindberg’s Miss Julie and passages from John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

Actuality and illusion, theatre and life jostle with one another to shape and define the real thing. Art counterfeits life; life imitates art.

When Henry and Charlotte split up, he marries Max’s ex-wife, Annie, with whom he had been having an affair. She is also an actress.

Scenes and relationships are repeated with variations, echoing, mirroring and twisting back on earlier episodes, while Stoppard examines love and betrayal, questioning whether commitment necessitates fidelity.

Agile and witty dialogue moulds intriguing characters and complex situations. Language is flourished and relished. For Stoppard, as for his authorial surrogate, Henry, good writing is a terminal value.

This production does a good deal of justice to Stoppard’s intelligent script, centring on the author-surrogate who weaves words as effortlessly as a Wesleyan preacher.

Pudgy, silver-haired, ultra-British Stephen Holmes is splendid in the part, dominating the stage from his slightly off-centre armchair, proclaiming himself the last romantic in his plummy, resonant voice. Constantly surprised by love, Holmes inhabits the part impeccably.

His two actress-wives interact well with the self-dramatizing playwright — Karen Shewbridge’s Charlotte is elegantly sophisticated, world-weary and catty; Maria Roberts’ Annie is sexily buxom and outgoing — and by no means stupidity made coherent, as Henry alleges.

Kevin Lewis is a somewhat unlikely Max, stylistically out of step with the other principals. Not originally cast in the part, he jumped into the breach at extremely short notice to save Beothuck Street’s Stoppardian bacon. So, bravo.

Twenty years old

Written in 1982, The Real Thing is now 20 years old, so that some of the references and properties are dated. And when that happens you have to be very, very careful. Apart from Pierre Berton, what writer now uses a manual typewriter? But, if you preserve the manual typewriter — the timeless muse, perhaps — can you afford to have a cordless telephone on the other side of the stage? Especially a cordless telephone that has the ring of a rotary dial phone out of Dial M for Murder?

Similarly, in 1982 you would certainly have needed a passport to travel from England to Switzerland, but it would have been one of those hard-backed classics, not a European Union soft-back.

However, these are picayune quibbles.

The Beothuck Street production of this very British play is strong and entertaining.

Two decades on, a Canadian audience may miss some of the references to Hermann and the Hermits and Desert Island Discs, but The Real Thing still preserves its capacity to challenge and engage an audience.

Directed by Janet O’Reilly and designed by Clar Doyle, the Beothuck Street Players’ production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing continues at the LSPU Hall until Saturday, also featuring Krystin Pellerin as Henry’s rebellious daughter Debbie, Andrew Dale as Annie’s actor-lover Billy, and Vincent O’Broithe as the prisoner-writer Brodie, who spends the last scene watching the videotape recording of the television broadcast of the play he wrote about his own experience, which had been instigated by Annie.