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The Invention of Love
by Adam Feldman
Broadway.com
March 29, 2001
The Invention of Love
By Tom Stoppard
Directed by Jack O’Brien
Lyceum Theatre
Tom Stoppard’s plays have often been distinguished by the playwright’s gift for balancing intellectual ambition with a well-honed sense of theater. In The Invention of Love, now playing at the Lyceum in a production directed by Jack O’Brien, the balance is off. Stoppard’s portrait of A. E. Housman, the English poet and classical scholar, is graced by his usual knack for witty dialogue and understated emotion. His formidable command of language is augmented here by that of Housman, whose voice (in both public and private writings) has been incorporated seamlessly into the text. Yet The Invention of Love is compromised by moments of academic opacity. The program for the play, accompanied by an informative issue of the Lincoln Center Theatre Review, helps clear up some of the confusion. Unfortunately, this supplemental material is unlikely to be read before the curtain goes up.
There are two Housmans in The Invention of Love: The precocious young Housman (Robert Sean Leonard), bleeding with unrequited love for an athletic Oxford chum, Moses Jackson (David Harbour); and the Housman he will become (Richard Easton), revered and feared as a classical scholar, his passions channeled into monumentalizing himself in the canon. The opening of the play finds the older Housman trading quips with Charon, the ferryman of Hades, and what follows is structured as a dead man’s dream: episodes from Housman’s life pass by, with the older Housman observing them, reenacting them, and in one key scene even conversing with his younger self. The tone is largely one of rue. Lacking the courage of his desire, Housman has hedged himself out of a full emotional life—unlike Oscar Wilde, who pops up throughout the evening as an object of gossip, parody, news, and scandal. At the climax of the play, Housman and Wilde meet up in the underworld, where Wilde (Daniel Davis) scorns his contemporary’s excess of restraint.
The Invention of Love is in many ways a beautiful play, cunningly structured and deeply felt. At least, that is how it reads in its published form. As a stage piece, it puts substantial obstacles in its own path, which O’Brien’s staging has not overcome. Much of the first act takes place at Oxford, where the young Housman spends his time discussing Greco-Roman verse in the company of Jackson and their mutual friend Pollard (Michael Stuhlbarg, in a vividly effete turn). Their professors, meanwhile—titanic figures like Pater and Ruskin—engage in vigorous debates about the meaning of life. The level of discourse is high by Broadway standards, but O’Brien has not made it accessible; much of the dialogue disappears in a rushed muddle of English accents and Latin phrases. Contemporary American audiences may find themselves bewildered by Stoppard’s references to Oxonian history, and at a loss to differentiate among the various characters until it is too late to do any good. With oases of exceptions, the first act takes on a dull, donnish quality—so much so that when the older Housman delivers an actual lecture on classical translation at the end of the act (a high point of Richard Easton’s excellent performance), it feels like Stoppard is ratcheting up the drama.
The second act, which deals more directly with the young Housman’s emotional confusion, is far more compelling. The scene in which Housman finally tells Jackson the truth about the nature of their friendship is one of the finest of Stoppard’s career, quietly devastating in its reserve. The older Housman’s scenes with Wilde, whether one agrees with Wilde’s assessments or not, have a great deal of meat on their bones, and are certain to stir discussion. Again, however, the play’s momentum is hindered somewhat by a series of episodes featuring secondary historical figures whose identities are not clarified by the staging. One scene, which O’Brien has dressed in the noisy trappings of the English music hall, is almost entirely unintelligible.
When the clouds of obscurity do part, the reach and power of The Invention of Love compare favorably with those of any play on Broadway since Copenhagen, and Bob Crowley’s magnificent set confirms his status as the classiest designer in town. The back wall of the stage alone is a work of art; in concert with Brian MacDevitt’s lighting, Crowley pulls off a dizzying variety of effects, from autumnal leafiness to the glittering glaze of raku pottery. (The gilded elegance of the design is disrupted only once in the show, when the Oxford professors perch on Alice-in-Wonderland stacks of oversized books. O’Brien seems to have mandated this addition in the interest of clarity—in the script, the profs are playing croquet—but in the context of the production it suggests not dream logic but desperation.) Though Robert Sean Leonard does not convincingly project Housman’s massive intellect, he is better with Housman’s suffering. Among the supporting cast, Daniel Davis and Mark Nelson (as a proto-gay friend of Housman’s) are especially good.
“You didn’t mention your poems,” says Wilde to Housman as they wait by the Styx, “How can you be unhappy when you know you wrote them?” This is a relevant consolation; the problem is that Stoppard has barely mentioned them either. Blink and you’ll miss the cameo appearance of Housman’s poetry in The Invention of Love; the program’s biographical timeline of Housman mentions A Shropshire Lad as having been published in 1896 (“in an edition of 500 copies at the expense of the author”) without noting that it later became one of the most popular works of verse in the English language. Stoppard seems to have worried that including more of Housman’s poetry would dilute The Invention of Love’s classically Romantic depiction of his life as a triumph of head over heart. The omission is telling in a play that, for all its brilliance, would itself benefit from more lyricism and less Latin.
