Director of The Real Thing, Sam Gold, discusses the play with Ted Sod.
Ted Sod: Why did you choose to direct Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing? What would you say the play is about?
Sam Gold: We all create narratives to live our lives. And then, at various times, we look from outside these constructs and ask ourselves what is the real thing? From our small introspective moments to our full-blown searches for self, we realize how many fictions we have to sift through. Am I really the person I say I am? Do I really love the person I say I do? Do I really believe in this political cause I am fighting for? Our answers are impossible to separate from our fantasies, lies, and the stories we like to live inside. Stoppard has given us the definitive play on this subject. Formally, it is an intricate puzzle of artifice and reality. But it is also a raw, emotional journey towards self-discovery.
TS: Does this play have personal resonance for you? And if so, how?
SG: Anyone who works in the arts has spent their life wrestling with the themes of this play. We all read
As You Like It and contemplated "All the world's a stage..." and decided to make the stage our vocation. The questions Stoppard raises in this play are the great questions that I've asked myself my whole life. It's such a pleasure to come across a play that takes questions and feelings out of my own mind and heart, and lays them on the page so fully and so successfully.
TS: The play was first performed in London in 1982 and a revised version was performed in 1999. Do you feel audiences will see the play as contemporary or as a period piece and why?
SG: The play explores love, jealousy, commitment, and the search for your true self. There is nothing dated about any of these topics. There are references that are clearly from the 80s, but that just creates the slight distance that shows you the universality of the play.
TS: What type of research did you have to do in order to direct the play?
SG: I don't believe in research. I'm a director, not an academic. A certain amount of ignorance helps me maintain a relationship with the play that is closer to the audience's perspective. Of course I'm sort of lying, because I do what I need to do to understand the world of the play.
TS: What did you look for in casting the actors? What qualities do you need to act in The Real Thing besides a facility with language?
SG: I think language has been devalued in contemporary culture. We no longer recite poetry in school. Our music is no longer lyric driven. Texts and Tweets value extreme brevity of communication. Stoppard is writing from a tradition and a culture where people expressed themselves through language much more. I have spent a lot of my career working on contemporary American plays that explore the failure of language, and rely heavily on sub-textual communication and even on inarticulateness. It will be a pleasure to work with actors to express themselves through the language, to value rhetoric and argument, and to find the depths of their emotional life within that context and not beside it. Though I hate to generalize, to a certain degree this is accentuated by differences in American and British acting training. We are more sub-textual and British acting tends to start from the words. But I am very excited to work with a cast from both sides of the Atlantic to bring Stoppard's words to life.
TS: How are you collaborating with your design team? How will the play manifest itself design wise? Will there be original music or sound in addition to the music that is referenced in the script?
SG: The play presents a very complicated puzzle of artifice and reality, plays within plays etc. Luckily it does so quite successfully, so I've decided to make a very simple, human, honest production that puts the focus on the words and the work of the actors. As for the music, it's tricky because Stoppard wrote this play when he was in his 40s about a protagonist his own age who listened to the music of the early 60s--the music of Stoppard's romantic, teenage years. Most people find the music they will love for life as a teenager, so this makes sense. But 60s music has a different context today. It's now the teenage music of someone in their 70s, and it has been playing on the radio, in movies,etc. for an extra 30 years. But the protagonist has a teenage daughter, Debbie, who I would imagine listens to the music of the early 80s. That also happens to be the music a forty-something today would have grown up with. So I think I will augment the music that Stoppard wrote into the play with some songs that relate more to Debbie, in order to find my own connection to those romantic teenage years and to evoke for the audience a different kind of nostalgia than the 60s music will.
TS: You are one of the busiest directors in NYC. How do you balance work with your personal life?
SG: My second child is due during our third week of rehearsal, so the word "balance" is maybe not applicable. I just take it one day at a time. I love what I do.
Previews begin October 2 at the American Airlines Theatre. For more information and tickets, please visit our website.
