Tom Stoppard explores the nature of illusion in The Real Thing: What constitutes reality in love, art, and politics? The Real Thing originated as a structural challenge for Stoppard: “This play wasn’t written in order to say certain things about writing,” he says. “It was written because I liked the idea of the game, the device of having the same thing happen two or three times.” In constructing this game, Stoppard references other works to both challenge narrative perception and use literature as a method for understanding one’s own experience.
Excerpts from August Strindberg’s Miss Julie and John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore figure prominently in The Real Thing. The play’s other literary tributes range from obscure to obvious—Stoppard borrows plot devices and paraphrases dialogue from Shakespeare, John Osborne, Noel Coward, George Gershwin, and Oscar Wilde, to name a few.
Intertextuality—or the way in which texts gain meaning through referencing other written work—is a recurring concept in the Stoppard canon; his plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Travesties reference and re-contextualize the work of others (Shakespeare, Albee, T.S Eliot, Beckett, et al.), to create a new, richly layered work. As scholar Kinmerth Meyer notes, Stoppard’s intertextual flourishes are used not to show off his gamesmanship (as some have claimed) but to “reaffirm the validity of literature in the human experience,” allowing Stoppard to "frame deeply personal considerations of human action, its motives and limitations and values," especially among characters who are playwrights and actors themselves.
—Lauren Halvorsen