Anna Mackmin returns to The Old Vic to direct Toby Stephens in Tom Stoppard's multi-award-winning modern classic. Deeply moving and startlingly funny, this razor sharp drama brilliantly examines the complex nature of love, art and reality.

HENRY, the hero of Tom Stoppard's ''Real Thing,'' is an English playwright of unbeatable intellectual prowess. He knows how to make words ''go on replicating themselves like a spiral of DNA'' and how to ad lib a brilliant rejoinder to any question. Both in life and in the theater, he can always get the last word and the smartest laugh. But there's one question Henry can't so easily answer or write about or joke away: What is this thing called love?