Starting in middle age, men frequently get an urge to revisit their pasts. Some, like Faust, want to become young again. Others fantasize about just going back for a visit with ourselves as young. Ah, what we could teach ourselves! With A. E. Housman, the ultimate pedant, the potential is intriguing. Tom Stoppard has chosen Housman to be his time-traveling subject in The Invention of Love -- an absorbing story of a man at the end of his life, examining his formative years. Like most Stoppard plays, it is intellectual yet rich with emotion. Compared with Arcadia, his immediately previous play, The Invention of Love is more introspective and autumnal. Stoppard examines the 1880's when Housman attended Oxford, and the Roman era at the beginnings of romantic poetry. We see how Housman achieved fame for the romantic poems, The Shropshire Lad, while his personal life foreswore romance in favor of reclusive scholarship.
Operating on several levels at once -- in the story and in Blanka Zizka's staging -- the play examines the poetry, as well as Housman's sublimated homosexuality. There's no narrative; rather, a series of episodes from various points in the poet/scholar's life. The most vivid scenes are the imagined meetings of the Housmans, young and old, and of Housman with Oscar Wilde, whose flamboyance contrasts with Housman's introversion.
Zizka's staging matches Stoppard's fantastic verbal flights. Charon, the boatman who ferries souls across the River Styx, flies to the stage from the ceiling in the rear of the theater. Other characters enter by sliding down poles. When Housman thinks of his past, his former self appears in the air, as it were, high above the stage at the rear. His classmates are seen playing croquette with giant-sized mallets and balls. This is an imaginative tour de-force for the author and the theater company. The cast is excellent, and Martin Rayner as the older Housman deserves special mention.
