The Real Thing

The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard is sort of like The Habit of Art in that it also toys with plays within plays, but it's less integral to the plot here and is more tacked on to show the characters' mental states. It follows the relationship of Henry and Annie, who are both married to different people at the beginning, but have an affair, leave their respective spouses and get married. We then follow their relationships through the years.
It was an okay play, but it suffered from a lot of monologueing that kind of came off like the author needed to say something and he was going to say it regardless of if it actually sounds like the sort of conversation real people have. This in itself would probably have been bearable, except that the acting got kind of over the top sometimes, usually when Annie was around. The play followed several years of the characters' life, but I feel like the only moments we see are the most melodramatic, philosophical ones. I'm not saying I want to see the boring parts, but I certainly would have liked to have felt like there *were* boring parts in their lives.
Not to say that it was all bad, it certainly was entertaining. I was just put off by the emphasis on philosophy over characterization. Also, it kind of annoyed me that even though the characters certainly change over time, we don't actually see how a lot of those changes happen. We know that Annie starts off jealous and then gets over it, but this happens over the course of a time skip and we never really see her evolution, just the end result of it. This makes the characters come off as kind of inconsistent, I felt.
So overall, it was okay, but not great.