The cricket bat speech, 'the most famous moment in 'The Real Thing'. 'The cricket bat speech had been gestating for a long time. It came out of his 1970s journal entries, where he had noted down: 'Good prose is sprung like a cricket bat''. Within the play it is Henry's repudiation of Annie's criticism of him and her promotion of Brodie, her cause, and comes after, 'You're jealous of the idea of a writer. You want to keep it sacred, special, not something anybody can do ... Then somebody who isn't in on the game comes along, like Brodie, who really has something to write about, something real, and you can't get through it.'
