What: The Real Thing

Who: Players' Guild of Hamilton

Where: Guild House, 80 Queen St. S.

When: Oct. 2, 3 and 4 and Oct. 9, 10 and 11

Tickets: 905-529-0284

What is love? How do you know it's the real thing?

When is art based on truth? Just because a painting or a piece of music seduces the heart doesn't mean it's actually good.

Can't the Everly Brothers or for that matter Little Miss Brenda Lee, be as soul-destroying as Callas singing Verdi?

Can't a guilty passion for The Righteous Brothers or Neil Sedaka be as rewarding as curling up with Bach or Beethoven?

In exploring the vagaries of art and life, playwright Tom Stoppard offers trenchant observations about sexual encounters, the sting of betrayal and the need to walk naked -- not just physically but spiritually -- with the person you love.

Something of a genius at intellectual badinage, Stoppard can lob a laugh line across a stage with the same assurance he uses to send off stinging rage. In many ways his weapons of humour and passion are the same.

Problem is, in The Players' Guild production of his New York and London hit, The Real Thing, there is blessed little of either.

This earnest, but dull production has been trampled into tiresome soap opera.

Director Michael Hannigan has solved the physical problems of Stoppard's play by locating the action in the same sleek living room. By allowing wall panels to change, he permits us to move into several apartments as well as the compartment of a train and a West End theatre stage.

What he hasn't done, nearly so smartly, is find the fire in Stoppard's drama of anxious love. There's no chemistry here. In spite of excellent performances from Elaine Hale as doe-eyed Annie, Martha Christianson as mercurial Charlotte and Michael Wierenga as cerebral Henry, flames don't erupt.

By removing the notion love affairs actually matter, Hannigan has robbed the play of its lethal passion.

The Real Thing can't exist as a cool intellectual exercise. It ought to be funny yet rip at the heart. It doesn't.

This Guild production of Stoppard's play lumbers along from scene to scene without building momentum. The pace is the same throughout, slow and portentous.

From the first scene, when we ought to realize we're watching actors in a shallow West End show, to a final moment of ultimate seduction as Annie offers herself to Henry, we ought to feel a frisson of tension. We don't.

One scene washes into another, linked by rolling waves of light that dip and rise without ever offering an element of closure.

For The Real Thing to work, the play would need a gritty realism to underscore its intellectual talk.

Michael Queripel is out of his depth as Max, dropping the ends of lines, making dialogue hard to hear. Dan Bulmer isn't believable as rising star Billy, looking too much like a fresh-scrubbed member of the local Boy Scouts.

Caitlin Wierenga looks fine as a with-it daughter searching for truth in a pseudo intellectual world, but sloppy diction makes her difficult to understand.

Adam Kuzick is an implausible Brodie, failing to suggest the man's know-it-all delusions.

The Players' Guild's Real Thing is worth seeing for Elaine Hale's persuasive performance as Annie. Her blazing eyes unlock secrets the rest of this troubled production doesn't even know exist.

The Real Thing ought to send you out disturbed. It has difficult things to say about the way love can die in an instant, the way truth is cloaked in intellectual puffery.

Trouble is, despite best intentions, this Guild production isn't The Real Thing after all. And that's a pity.

Gary Smith has written on theatre and dance for The Hamilton Spectator for more than 25 years.