The opening scene of Tom Stoppard's cleverly layered comedy of love and language deliberately wrongfoots you.

A pompous mansplainer (Oliver Johnstone) is catching his wife out in adultery while pontificating on Japanese versus Swiss watches.

Just as you are wondering why you booked a ticket for this arch drawing room drama (surely this can't be the work of our greatest living playwright?) it emerges it's a parody - written by self-satisfied playwright Henry, (James McArdle) who is having an affair with the lead actor's wife.

Bel Powley as Annie and Oliver Johnstone as Max in The Real ThingBel Powley as Annie and Oliver Johnstone as Max in The Real Thing (Image: Manuel Harlan)

As he self-consciously selects his records for Desert Island Discs, Henry is experiencing the heady joy of infidelity but not yet the pain.

All that changes as his relationship with Bel Powley's Annie grows, complicating notions of 'injured parties' and asking if it's possible for language to capture the experience of love.

All the characters are actors or writers, and Stoppard also toys with ideas of what is real, dovetailing plays within plays. This is playfully pointed up in meta scene changes with dancing stagehands, one of whom becomes Annie's actor co-star, flirting though a scene from Tis Pity She's A Whore.

This tricksiness, and the problematic imbalance between Henry's eloquent, poetic speeches about truth and meaning, and Annie's impulsive instinctiveness are partially solved in Max Webster's stylish revival, which makes great use of Henry's beloved pop songs during scene changes on Peter McKintosh's startlingly blue set.

A scene from The Real Thing at The Old VicA scene from The Real Thing at The Old Vic (Image: Manuel Harlan)

A sub-plot about Annie's protege, a working class soldier imprisoned for political protest who writes a terrible play, gives Henry the opportunity for a spot of middle class sneering and deploying a cricket bat writing metaphor.

Yet somehow, charmingly, McArdle manages to make this smug chauvinist empathetic as he becomes a humbled, crumpled lover, failing to write his play about love.

Love, he says, is not of the flesh but through it, it is 'knowing and being known.'

And despite the four decades that have dated some of the sexual and class politics, Stoppard's wit, wisdom, verbal dexterity and playmaking, still make for revelatory and thrilling theatre.

The Real Thing runs at The Old Vic until October 26.