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Even better than 'Arcadia,' and that's really saying something.
***
(from a 2004 blog post)
Damn, that is a smashin' play. The circularity of it all got a little tiresome towards the end ("Mr. Stoppard doesn’t borrow other dramatists’ plots. He has no need. He has no plots" -- John Heilpern in the Observer), and was the most annoyingly-Stoppardian thing about it, but I loved the long monologues about literary scholarship and Latin love poetry, real prose structures, and most of AE's lines direct from his own mouth -- or pen, rather. Those are probably just the things that would make it unpalatable to a larger audience, but hell, if they want to watch Baywatch, let them eat cheesecake. The play offers great possibilities mandere for the actors playing AE, Housman, and Wilde (and why is Wilde stuck in there? As kinsman and foil to the poet-scholar, inevitably; but at his appearance if you know he died in 1900 the brain skips in that groove, 1900-1936, 1900-1936, until Stoppard shows his poetic license and registration) but the other characters are mostly ciphers, except for a few moments with Chamberlain. It'd be lovely to see what great elderly character actors could do with monuments such as Jowett and Ruskin, though. (I freely admit my heart warmed toward Housman not just because I learned he was at "their" St. John's College but also that he gutted Jowett like a fish.) Further showing up the rather false flashiness of pairing Wilde and Housman, as Michael M. Thomas observes, "Housman would have been writing Last Poems in Cambridge at almost the exact same time as, 80 miles to the southwest in London, T.S. Eliot would have been putting the finishing touches on The Wasteland....What a pairing! If ever there was a made-for-Stoppard juxtaposition, wouldn't it be these two men, dry in a dry season?"
But in a very real sense that doesn't matter, given such stuff as Housman's two different sayings of "Corruption?" -- "Oh, corruption" and not just the is-love-real-or-is-it-only-invented arguments which give the play its title, but also one of the best moments in theatre ever: "You think there is an answer: the lost autograph copy of life's meaning, which we might recover from the corruptions that have made it nonsense. But if there is no such copy, really and truly there is no answer." And in that you see text and breath alloyed together, as if they weren't really separate at all.
Invention is sort of a lot more unwieldy and awkward than the sleekness of Arcadia, but at the same time, everything happens _offstage_ in Arcadia -- Byron, Thomasina's (spoiler), what happens to Septimus -- and Housman is on the stage so much in Invention it's quite the opposite, he's there _all the time,_ and the emotion just sears your heart. -- I do quibble with some of the ways he _portrayed_ Housman -- he has AE crying out to Mo, "You're half my life!" when in reality what we have is
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my life in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways
in a poem. Which Mo probably never read. And deliberately didn't understand, if he did read it. And I really doubt AE would have blurted out anything like that. I can understand why Stoppard does it, but...well, anyway, it's a quibble.
Anthony Lane's NYorker article on the play is really amazing. "Lost Horizon: the Sad and Savage Wit of AE Housman" (He says in either the intro to Nobody's Perfect or a Tina Brown encomium that her query about the piece was, 'Is Housman hot?')
***
(from a 2004 blog post)
Damn, that is a smashin' play. The circularity of it all got a little tiresome towards the end ("Mr. Stoppard doesn’t borrow other dramatists’ plots. He has no need. He has no plots" -- John Heilpern in the Observer), and was the most annoyingly-Stoppardian thing about it, but I loved the long monologues about literary scholarship and Latin love poetry, real prose structures, and most of AE's lines direct from his own mouth -- or pen, rather. Those are probably just the things that would make it unpalatable to a larger audience, but hell, if they want to watch Baywatch, let them eat cheesecake. The play offers great possibilities mandere for the actors playing AE, Housman, and Wilde (and why is Wilde stuck in there? As kinsman and foil to the poet-scholar, inevitably; but at his appearance if you know he died in 1900 the brain skips in that groove, 1900-1936, 1900-1936, until Stoppard shows his poetic license and registration) but the other characters are mostly ciphers, except for a few moments with Chamberlain. It'd be lovely to see what great elderly character actors could do with monuments such as Jowett and Ruskin, though. (I freely admit my heart warmed toward Housman not just because I learned he was at "their" St. John's College but also that he gutted Jowett like a fish.) Further showing up the rather false flashiness of pairing Wilde and Housman, as Michael M. Thomas observes, "Housman would have been writing Last Poems in Cambridge at almost the exact same time as, 80 miles to the southwest in London, T.S. Eliot would have been putting the finishing touches on The Wasteland....What a pairing! If ever there was a made-for-Stoppard juxtaposition, wouldn't it be these two men, dry in a dry season?"
But in a very real sense that doesn't matter, given such stuff as Housman's two different sayings of "Corruption?" -- "Oh, corruption" and not just the is-love-real-or-is-it-only-invented arguments which give the play its title, but also one of the best moments in theatre ever: "You think there is an answer: the lost autograph copy of life's meaning, which we might recover from the corruptions that have made it nonsense. But if there is no such copy, really and truly there is no answer." And in that you see text and breath alloyed together, as if they weren't really separate at all.
Invention is sort of a lot more unwieldy and awkward than the sleekness of Arcadia, but at the same time, everything happens _offstage_ in Arcadia -- Byron, Thomasina's (spoiler), what happens to Septimus -- and Housman is on the stage so much in Invention it's quite the opposite, he's there _all the time,_ and the emotion just sears your heart. -- I do quibble with some of the ways he _portrayed_ Housman -- he has AE crying out to Mo, "You're half my life!" when in reality what we have is
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my life in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways
in a poem. Which Mo probably never read. And deliberately didn't understand, if he did read it. And I really doubt AE would have blurted out anything like that. I can understand why Stoppard does it, but...well, anyway, it's a quibble.
Anthony Lane's NYorker article on the play is really amazing. "Lost Horizon: the Sad and Savage Wit of AE Housman" (He says in either the intro to Nobody's Perfect or a Tina Brown encomium that her query about the piece was, 'Is Housman hot?')
