The Old Vic’s new production of The Real Thing, designed by Peter McKintosh, blurs the London of 2024 and the Tom Stoppard play’s original 1980s setting. There’s neon everywhere, but it’s clean and crisp, like a post-lockdown London co-working space.
There’s a moment, however, when we step into a different era. This is (alas) another play about playwrights and actors; two of our characters endanger a marriage while starring together in John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. The rehearsal scene is brief, but perfect. The iambic rhythm of Ford’s blank verse couldn’t be more different from the acerbic syncopation of Stoppard’s modern-day characters; the stakes of illicit love in Ford’s story infinitely higher than the nonchalance with which our contemporary creatives shrug off infidelities. Yet the actors, Bel Powley and Rilwan Abiola Owokoniran, swim seamlessly between both registers. Their banter about the nature of desire—Ford’s and Stoppard’s texts question how we identify “real” love—slips in and out of the language of both playwrights, rendering each voice entirely natural and contemporary. That’s surely down to the talented director, Max Webster.
Webster is a master of code-switching. Few directors of his generation—he’s barely into his forties—have worked so widely across genres, from spectacular pop culture adaptations to classical opera and canonical texts. His early career gave him the literary training—English at Cambridge—followed by two years of physical theatre at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris. Webster has talked previously about drawing on his circus training at Lecoq for his multi-award-winning adaptation of Life of Pi, a puppetry-based extravaganza based on Yann Martel’s novel. What colleagues credit most for his meteoric career, however, is simply that “he works hard, reads widely, thinks deeply”.
This autumn is Webster’s moment. The Old Vic is banking on his production of The Real Thing to headline its season, with Stoppard himself working on the text. (At their first meeting, Webster brought along an ancient copy of the play, “which I had stolen from my school library as a teenager and failed to ever return.”) Across town, his acclaimed production of Macbeth is about to transfer to the West End with David Tennant and Cush Jumbo—the calibre of talent that Webster now attracts. In the same season, Webster makes his National Theatre debut with another school-syllabus classic, The Importance of Being Earnest. His production of Oscar Wilde’s comedy will star Ncuti Gatwa alongside Sharon D Clarke: few other directors can have worked simultaneously with two different incarnations of Doctor Who.
Webster’s acclaimed production of Macbeth is about to transfer to the West End
If Webster’s CV this autumn leans towards heritage playwrights, that tells us more about current pressures on theatre programming than about him. With theatres still deep in debt after the pandemic, executives are banking on classic names to pull in regulars and school trips.
Webster approaches Stoppard and Shakespeare very differently. With Stoppard, he tells me, “I always kept in the back of my mind something I read in Stoppard’s biography, where he told an actor his plays were like well-made cars and you could drive them with one finger on the wheel.” Macbeth, by contrast, is an exercise in taking a familiar text completely apart and putting it back together: “Less one finger on the wheel and more taking out the whole engine and re-assembling all the constituent parts.”
Taking things apart to see how they work seems to be a longstanding habit: Webster wasn’t much interested in childhood piano lessons, he tells me, “until my inspired teacher took out a screwdriver and showed me how the incredibly complex mechanism of a piano comes apart, after which I was hooked.”
The Real Thing is a solid production of a slightly dated modern classic, but Macbeth, judging by its prior run at the Donmar Warehouse, is a once-in-a-generation theatrical experience. Webster attracted Tennant and Jumbo with a clear vision for the play: “by focusing on mental health, and thinking about how Macbeth is a soldier who has just returned from war, and that both of them are a couple who have lost a child.”
If you can find a ticket to Macbeth’s sold-out run, be there. If not, I suspect we will all have the opportunity to see much more of Max Webster’s work in years to come.
