Put them in the right order, and you can give the world a little nudge

There's a line in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing (currently at the Old Vic) that made me smile in recognition - 'I don't like artists, I like singles' - but having seen Stoppard's Arcadia last year, and now this revival, I may reconsider that philosophy.

The Real Thing is a play about love, and also about writing. The protagonist, Henry (superbly played by Toby Stephens) is an intellectual smart-ass playwright with more than a passing resemblance to Stoppard himself. He leaves his wife Charlotte for actress Annie, who in turn cuckolds him with a young lover. Henry is a man who uses his command of language as a weapon, but he also defends the use of words as a means of advancing ideas. He compares them to cricket bats, which are made out of several pieces of wood balanced in perfect proportion so as to send a ball on its way at just the right velocity.

This is a fine play, the real thing in more ways than one, with excellent acting, witty dialogue and a literary style that is unusual in modern theatre but never quite tips over into pretension. As a humble creative writing student myself, it's when one watches a play like this and then struggles even to write a short review, that one realises the gulf that exists between we aspirants and the truly gifted. But it gives you something to aim for, even if you're having a little trouble getting off the launch pad.

Remakes

I've always been sceptical about remakes, especially the recent trend to remake comparatively recent films like Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street (franchises that only actually ended the first time in the last decade or so), but this latest atrocity surely takes the biscuit.

Death at a Funeral is a moderately amusing comedy directed by Frank 'Yoda' Oz that came out in 2007.

Death at a Funeral is a remake directed by Neil la Bute, that is coming out in 2010.

It even features one of the same actors reprising his role!

If Death at a Funeral Mark One was in Korean or Swahili then there might be some small justification for such a piece of filmic depravity but the film is in English, was directed by an American and even features some American actors in the cast.

There have of course been a few justified remakes, a surprising example being the Clooney/Pitt/Damon Oceans Eleven which was a big improvement on the Rat Pack's original, but really the way things are going we can envisage a day when the remake is released before the original...