BUT WHERE’S THE BITE? : SOUTH COAST REP SERVES STOPPARD’S ‘REAL THING’

The hero of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” has no problem formulating his response to the major issues: love, writing and cricket. But when he tastes his wife’s chip dip, the best he can do is: “It needs something.”

One might say the same of South Coast Repertory’s version of Stoppard’s comedy. (The Mark Taper Forum did it at the Doolittle two summers ago.) Everything’s in place, including the accents. But where’s the vinegar?

Stoppard’s basic issue here is L-O-V-E, the real thing. It’s a subject that his playwright hero (Nicolas Surovy) feels he can’t write, possibly because he has never felt it.

He supposes he loves his actress wife (Joan Stuart-Morris) but he has never known the big thrill and the big hurt, as described by the Supremes. (He adores American pop records.) As far as he’s concerned, it’s a legal fiction.

Then he gets smitten with another man’s wife (Christine Healy), and it all gets very complicated and incredibly painful. They marry, and Henry’s life goes back on course for a time.

But benign neglect won’t do with this wife. And when another man comes into the picture (Tom Harrison), Henry finds himself positively groveling at her feet--your typical stock husband. Poor Henry. But he’s more alive now. And since his new wife has also paid her dues, it may be a match after all.

This is a play about growing up, about finding what words mean and about the theater. (Henry’s new wife is also an actress, and several scenes are played in quotation marks.) As articulate as all the characters are, they aren’t gabbing in a vacuum: there’s plenty of emotional material to play, and Lee Shallat’s cast is sensitive to it.

But they go about their work with far too much modesty, suggesting understudies holding the fort until the real actors come on. Surovy is light and bright as Henry, but he doesn’t make him a man who absolutely insists on your attention--and who speaks so brilliantly, even when it’s brilliant nonsense, that it’s a pleasure to give it.

There’s also something muted about Stuart-Morris and Healy as his two wives--not totally wrong for the second wife, an inward woman, but quite wrong for the first one, who has learned to hold her own with Henry over the years.

More, please! Richard Doyle is more like it as the man whom Henry makes a cuckold, and Tom Harrison is very much like it as the young fellow who does the same to Henry. He leaps out and takes your attention, rather than nicely treading water.

Ron Boussom as a loutish Scots revolutionary--politics is another of the play’s concerns--also bites into his role with the proper joy. It’s nice to get the accents right in a play like this, but it’s more important to get the energy right. In theater, that’s the real thing.

‘THE REAL THING’ Tom Stoppard’s play, at South Coast Repertory. Director Lee Shallat. Settings Cliff Faulkner. Costumes Shigeru Yaji. Lighting Paulie Jenkins. Production manager Red Carlsson. Stage manager Bonnie Lorenger. Production assistant Delphine Urbien. Serge Ossorguine. Dialect coach Hugo Napier. UCI Intern Leslie Gray. With Richard Doyle, Joan Stuart-Morris, Nicolas Surovy, Christine Healy, Tom Harrison, Amy Resnick, Ron Boussom. Plays TuesdaysFridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 8 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 and 7;30 p.m. Tickets $17-$24. 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (714) 957-4033.