the good life?

reviewed The Real Thing King's Theatre, Edinburgh,Run Ended HHHH Oh! What a Lovely WarTheatre Workshop, Edinburgh,Until June 15

HHH In 1991, Tom Stoppard famously left his wife Miriam for the actress Felicity Kendal; in 1982 he had unveiled his "love play", The Real Thing. It's hard not to view the play as suspiciously prescient - its plot concerns a clever-clogs playwright, Henry, who leaves his wife for Annie, an actress appearing in his plays - especially when you consider that Annie was played by Kendal in the original production.

Appropriately, The Real Thing focuses on the sticky relationships between art and life; between our neatly ordered principles and the messy emotions that foul them up. This being Stoppard, the play - revived by Bristol Old Vic for a UK tour - is quite a box of tricks, stuffed to bursting-point with theatrical sleight of hand, dramatic irony, parallels and echoes, wordplay and snatches of plays-within-a- play - among them that classic Jacobean tragedy of forbidden love, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore.

This too is appropriate, because Stoppard is also writing about writing. His dramatic alter-ego insists it's a process that demands an intellectual rigour that lazy thinking - however prettily expressed - will confound. Henry's pronouncement that "words are sacred" might sound pompous, but the speech that precedes it - comparing the craft of writing with that of making a cricket bat - is an acutely persuasive defence of good art versus good intentions.

John Gordon Sinclair plays Henry as a witty, articulate John Gordon Sinclair - which is to say he's natural and likeable, but still Gregory. Yet it's an approach that suits the material remarkably well. Stoppard allows us glimpses of the unfathomable pain love can bring, and delves into the philosophy of feeling, but mostly pitches the piece as a thoughtful, slightly arch comedy.

Suzan Sylvester is believable and attractive as Annie, sparring nimbly with Sinclair. The show is involving, ingenious and often very funny, though director Alan Strachan does falter a little in his sense of period. There are some unmistakable 1980s references, and Henry works on that literary dinosaur, a typewriter, and dressing all the characters in 21st-century clothes does not resolve the play's slightly dated feel. All the same, it offers ample evidence that both love and art are eternal, timeless themes.

That's also true of war, but there are times when war plays feel sickeningly topical. We are in such a time, and Oh! What A Lovely War brings it chillingly home - especially in an early scene which finds the Germans dismissing war as "unthinkable" and "out of the question", words not unfamiliar to Messrs Vajpayee and Musharraf. This bitterly ironic musical revue about the first world war was originally devised by Joan Littlewood's popular and radical Theatre Workshop in 1963 and has now been revived by Edinburgh's (unrelated) Theatre Workshop as a community production.

It's an elaborate, spectacular affair, with a cast of around 50, a live orchestra, lavish costumes, expert lighting and back- projections of the ghastly scenes and statistics of that terrible and futile conflict.

As we must expect from a community show, standards of acting, singing, dancing and musicianship are highly variable, though a few performers are of professional standard. The variability, is entirely forgivable - and at times the group singing is profoundly affecting.

The only significant problem with Robert Rae's production is its sluggish pacing, which spreads the material too thinly over nearly three hours. The first casualty of a war play should not be brevity.

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