Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing has a so-so beginning, then a much better one, and finally ends up much as it began. Confused? Well, this is classic mid-period Stoppard - what did you expect?
The opening scene shows cuckolded husband Max remorsefully deconstructing the alibi of his wife, Charlotte, as she tries to sustain the fiction of having been in Geneva. In scene two, we see Charlotte bedded in with her new paramour, playwright Peter. But when Max breezes in for Sunday brunch with wife Annie, the construct is revealed: Max and Charlotte were playing characters in a drama written by Peter. But then Peter falls for Annie and things begin to get very Stoppardian indeed.
Whereas Stoppard usually casts far and wide for dramatic analogies, here he uses theatre as its own metaphor. Three of the main characters are actors, and therefore versed in the art of appearing other than they really are, while Henry is a comfortable, successful playwright, better suited to spinning elegant, solipsistic dialogue than dealing with the messy emotional realities of love. Stoppard has said this "was me, talking about myself before writing the Real Thing", and Peter Lindford perceptively mines the intellectual insecurities of Henry, a facile egotist who doesn't want to admit to liking naff 1960s bubblegum pop on Desert Island Discs.
Christopher Wright's Max powerfully plumbs the pain of infidelity, while as the two women they fight over, Caroline Harding and Lucy Tregear are so closely aligned as to share the same haircut. The only real drawback with Chris Honer's production is that after the passage of 20 years, the play-within-a-play construct feels less like an innovation than a tired convention. An audacious revival might experiment with how the play would look without it - a wholly truthful work of art sometimes has greater impact when left unframed.
· Until March 12. Box office: 0161-236 7110.
