Oxford Playhouse, 17-20 Feb 2010

Check out Sir Tom Stoppard's views on the play...

Click here to see a video interview

Alligator 19 Feb 2010

Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love tells the story of classical scholar and poet A.E. Housman; specifically his optimistic Oxford days and the subsequent regrets of disappointed ambition and, at the core, his unrequited love for his college friend, Moses Jackson. 

The first act of this ‘Old Street Productions’ interpretation sparkles with the elegant wit of Stoppard’s text, realised sincerely and naturally by the confident cast.  And who better, or indeed where better, to bring to life the self-indulgent and eloquent ruminations of late 19th-century Oxford “aesthetes”…?!

In this well-paced and slick first act, the direction and design are not challenging or adventurous, but instead luxuriate in the easy hyperbole of the Oxford ‘toff’ offered up by Stoppard’s text.  The artful set and lighting design capture the warmth of a summer spent in University Parks in a way that is particularly pertinent for an Oxford audience, whilst the columns and creamy drapes allude to the Classical Greek culture that preoccupies the characters throughout the play. 

The cast appear utterly comfortable with the script and revel in the opportunities for overstatement, which makes this production a genuine delight to watch.  Occasionally the exaggerated accents are achieved at the cost of diction and volume, but this improves during the performance as the cast get into their stride. 

An entertainingly heightened flamboyance of characters such as the young Housman, Walter Pater, and particularly Oscar Wilde is successfully achieved through exaggerated characterisation and unashamedly camp costume. Pater’s famous words, advocating ‘art for art’s sake,’ have perhaps been adopted as an approach to this production, and certainly ring true in the wonderfully superficial and decadent entertainment provided in the first act. 

In the second act we see an added depth to Housman and to the production as a whole, as the frivolity of the Oxford days is tainted by Housman’s later reflections and regrets.  The competence of the cast, particularly Matthew Osman (Housman), Joseph Robertson (Young Housman) and Jonathan Webb (Jackson), come to the fore here through impressive characterisation and an ease of onstage interaction that depicts Housman’s relationships with poignancy.  

This is not initially a challenging production, but it provides pure, scintillating entertainment, an indulgence in beautiful language, and towards the end as the superficial frivolity falls away, a very touching portrayal of what is essentially a tragic love story. 

Emily Shirtcliff 17 Feb 2010

DR: What does it mean for you to have The Invention of Love put on in Oxford?

TS: It was my best Christmas present! I suppose for reasons that are fairly obvious, it’s not most people’s favourite, but I think I enjoyed writing it more than any other play. Housman combines two areas which fascinate me and suit me as a writer. A play about a Latin scholar is considered a bit of a challenge, and I suppose that Oxford is one of the places where that subject matter is in exactly the right context.

But I should add firstly that it was quite clear in practice that the play works on an emotional level rather than an intellectual level, which is to say that the play was widely liked not just in London, but in New York also, and that wouldn’t have been so had it not been, in the broadest sense, a love story.

And, leaving aside the sexual orientation and so forth, I identify with it quite strongly; I enjoyed writing it and I loved the practical work of helping to rehearse it and put it on. In both London and New York, it was a happy experience.

DR: You said it was an emotional play rather than an intellectual play. In New York, a reviewer said that the play was so obscure that even the title didn’t refer to love, but to a love poem! I thought this was completely missing the point – the play is a love story.

TS: It’s about a man who falls in love when he’s an undergraduate and essentially remains enthralled by an impossible unrequited love for the rest of his life.

DR: What I got from the play was this dichotomy between Oxford as a place of great scholarship, and this threat of industrialization, the train from London to Birmingham. There’s a great bit at the beginning of the play: Pattison says “Great reform made us into a cramming shop. The railway brings in the fools and takes them away with their tickets punched for the world outside”.

It’s less about Oxford students as Classics scholars, more about Oxford students as potential management consultants. I recognise this, because I’m in my final year, applying for jobs.

TS: There are people who would say, with some justice, that it wouldn’t be healthy for Oxford or any other university to insulate itself from what we might call ‘the real world’ and so forth. The industrial age invading Oxford, or Oxford existing to punch the tickets for people who are then going to make their way in a very different kind of world… I couldn’t dissent from what you’ve said, but it would be wrong to suppose that that was the point I was after making. One is simply going along with the human character and here also historical narrative.

Every play needs a point of origin, a spark which tells the writer that there’s a play here – and in my case the simple core was that the classical and the romantic were here combined in one life, and in a way the two halves were fighting each other in some sense. Or, if you like, the scholar and the poet were taking turns to live a single life.

DR: At the beginning of the play AEH is described as both a scholar and poet and the reaction is something like – “what, at the same time?”

TS: Yes, at the same time!

DR: Some of the criticism I’ve read seems to suggest that people forget that The Invention of Love is a comedy as well.

TS: Certainly, my experience of the play in production is that the audience laughs quite a lot – sometimes more than I’d expect. I like jokes.

I like the thought that one tries to write well, that plays are good, bad or indifferent, and the good ones cut across all the categories. I would rather spend the evening at a great production of a French farce than an indifferent production of Hamlet.

It’s all to do with how good theatre can be – I’m talking about the theatre as a whole, everything from light cues to the actor’s soliloquy. So I’d be sorry if people thought it was a difficult play, because part of the fun is to take something which sounds difficult (like Latin scholarship) and make it intelligible and interesting, and, one hopes, fun.

DR: I’ve seen the production in rehearsal, and Roger [Granville, the director] has really brought that out. Especially with characters like Labouchere, who is played by a big guy with a booming voice.

TS: I think what one wants most of all is that the director is somebody who just loves the play and has responded to it, and so I’m very pleased about that.

DR:. I’d like to ask you about the character of Oscar Wilde. Wilde is very much in the wings, he’s a continual presence on and off stage. Housman in the age of Wilde: what’s the relationship between the two?

TS: Well, everything’s about character. Wilde was audacious and flamboyant about everything, including his sexuality; Housman was cautious and much more under the sway of the morality of the time, and full of…well I don’t know, it’s quite presumptious to say what Housman was full of – how do I know?...but my sense of it is that he was full of caution, anxiety… agony I would say too.

Wilde was not apologetic about the course he’d taken. There’s a moment when Housman expresses sympathy for Wilde; he says “You’ve lived at the wrong time, you should have lived in Megara when one could publish poetry to the boy one loved,” and so on, and Wilde rejects this attempt to sympathize with him; he says, on the contrary, this world, this England, at this time, is where he exhibited his values and people paid attention to him.

DR: “Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light”

TS: That’s right. Housman was frightened by the burst of light, and paid for it. Again, it’s presumptious to talk about Housman as though one knew what was going on inside of him, but to all the evidence, he remained faithful to that first flame of passion, and he knew it was hopeless. I’m blabbering on like this as though I had all these intentions! One writes line by line, one tries not to make it boring, frankly.

But I had a wonderful time doing the necessary reading – reading Pater and Ruskin and trying to weave my way through Housman’s classical papers and so on. I think of it as being the most enjoyable research that I’ve ever undertaken. I had to stop reading because I was running out of time!

I said goodbye to Latin and Greek when I was in the Sixth Form, which was a long time ago! It got me back into Latin, to some extent, I benefited personally from having written the play, and I met some very nice Latinists in the process.

DR: It is a play which does have this classical bent, it’s a very literary play. However, the real message is less about Latin scholars than about undergraduates at Oxford…

TS: Undergraduate life, and so on – absolutely. I did see the play in German once, but it’s not a play which is widely done, and I’m really thrilled that somebody’s doing it.

10 Feb 2010

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