Comedy of Ambush: Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing

Abstract

When the curtain rises on The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard's most recent comedy, we see a solitary figure, Max, seated in his living-room; "[he] is using a pack of playing cards to build a pyramidical, tiered viaduct on the coffee table in front of him. '" Suddenly we hear the off-stage front door being opened; Max calls out "Don't slam - " (p. 9), but before he can finish his sentence, the door slams and his viaduct of cards collapses. The door-slammer is his wife, Charlotte, who pops briefly into the room before returning to the hall to remove her topcoat. Charlotte has just come back from a business trip to Switzerlandor so she claims; the problem is that, during her absence, Max has ransacked her private belongings and discovered her passport in her recipe drawer.