directed by blanka zizka
NEWS & NOTES
TRIUMPH OF LOVE: TOM STOPPARD'S LATEST PLAY GETS A SPECTACULAR PRODUCTION AT THE WILMA
Philadelphia City Paper: February 24, 2000
By Toby Zinman
The Invention of Love at the Wilma is a daring and gorgeous theatrical risk in every possible way, and it turns out to be the best kind of risk: the one that ends in triumph. (This may be the best kind of triumph, too, the one that starts with risk.) Let me count the ways:
The play, by Tom Stoppard, is certainly risky: the biography of somebody most people have never heard of (19th-century English poet/scholar A.E. Housman), long (three hours), arcane (full of Latin and Greek), witty (rather than funny) and, best of all, deeply, warmly human without ever being sentimental.
The direction, by Blanka Zizka, brilliantly makes this difficult play lively and vivid without ever compromising its difficulty - this Wilma production is far more interesting and accessible than the London production I saw at the National.
The set, by Michael McGarty, is both clever and spectacular - from the immense marble head of Adonis sightlessly overseeing the proceedings, to the glimpses of boats rowing on rivers real and mythic, to huge hilarious cricket balls, to a firepole elegantly descended - it is a work of great theatrical imagination.
The costumes, by Janus Stefanowicz, manage to be simultaneously adorable and historically dignified. The acting meets the daunting challenges of an essentially actionless play filled with long, elevated conversation and the portrayal of characters of great subtlety and eccentricity. Although the entire cast is nearly flawless, my biggest bravos go to Martin Rayner (old Housman), Mark Alhadeff (young Housman), Ian Merrill Peakes (Jackson), Benjamin Lloyd (especially as Pater) and H. Michael Walls (Charon).
If A.E. Housman is known today, it is as the author of the collection of poems A Shropshire Lad; in his day, he was the greatest classical scholar in England, a distinction for which he is now almost altogether forgotten.
The play begins at the moment of death, and proceeds through memory - when he met Moses Jackson, a "lightfoot lad" if ever was one, when they were undergraduates at Oxford, and fell into hopeless love with this heterosexual jock, and then, for more than 50 years, lived a life of repression and silence. The scenes between the old Housman and his young self are the core of the play, when enthusiasm meets blighted hope, but where we see the passion that sustained the man's life for 77 years. There are scenes in Housman's study as he writes venomous criticism of other scholars' work, scenes in the classroom berating his Cambridge students, as well as the early sunny scenes of rowing on the river and picnicking in the grass; there are all the dons, the journalists and the parliamentarians who created the climate in this late 19th-century English hothouse, as they argued over translations of ancient manuscripts and passed the laws that made homosexuality illegal in England. The play doesn't have any plot but this cloistered life itself; Stoppard even resists fictionalizing a solution to the one little mystery of Housman's life: why he failed his degree exams.
One of Invention of Love's most powerful scenes is between Housman and England's most celebrated victim, Oscar Wilde (George Tynan Crowley) as they wait on shore for death's boatman. Wilde takes his opulent farewell to life, but not before giving the play its title: "Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention." The genius of the play and this superb production is that it sweeps us into both the invention and the seeing past it - that deeply human act of hindsight managing to be both ruthlessly honest and miraculously compassionate.
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