January 13–20, 2000

cover story

Knowledge Is Power

Tom Stoppard talks about his latest play.

by Toby Zinman

Smoking nearly as relentlessly as he rolls his R’s, his hair, like his clothes, charmingly rumpled, Tom Stoppard, even in an early-morning, pre-rehearsal interview, is eloquent and gracious. One of the English-speaking world’s most distinguished (not to mention enjoyable) playwrights is in town again, this time to advise on the Wilma Theater’s production of his newest play, The Invention of Love, which opened to acclaim in London in 1997. The Wilma and its artistic directors, Blanka Zizka and Jiri Zizka, have a special affinity for Stoppard’s works, having also produced Travesties, On The Razzle and Arcadia. Their production of Invention, opening Feb. 16, is one of two nearly simultaneous American premieres (the other, directed by Carey Perloff in San Francisco, will open shortly before Philadelphia’s).

This latest play is about A.E. Housman, the late 19th-century English poet who wrote A Shropshire Lad and who was also the greatest classical scholar-critic of his age. The play begins with A.E.H. as an old man who, as he is dying, remembers his youth, when he fell in love — hopelessly — with Moses Jackson, a fellow undergraduate at Oxford. Not only was Jackson straight and oblivious of Housman’s feelings, but homosexuality was illegal in England. Oscar Wilde, the era’s most celebrated victim, who also loved unwisely, makes brief appearances in the course of the drama, defining the play’s title: "but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention."

Here are bits of our conversation last Wednesday morning in Stoppard’s hotel suite:

Q: I saw the first production of Invention of Love in London — will this one be similar?

A: This production is going to be very different from anything you saw in London — obviously I haven’t seen it myself, but I know what the design ideas are and it’s very gratifying to be involved in a production of one’s plays that starts from scratch. It’s a bit depressing if one sees a show in America that tends to reconstruct the London production. Blanka’s Invention of Love is, I think, very beautiful and interesting. She’s taken up the fact that it is a dream play so it isn’t realistic because it takes place in Housman’s head — he’s dying after all.

Q: That concept changes Wilde’s indictment of Housman at the end of the play, doesn’t it? If it’s all happening internally, then it’s a self-indictment and that expands the character.

A: That’s true. It adds the dimension of self-knowledge. As you know they never met, Wilde and Housman, they overlapped [at Oxford] by a year. Wilde, from our perspective, is the hero of that period, and Housman is not.

Q: Are you making any changes in the script for this production?

A: I made a few small changes when the play transferred from the National Theatre to the West End [in London] and that became the basis of the American version, the Grove Press edition, the one the Wilma is using. So it’s pretty much the same play, but it always changes a little if I’m around to change it. And very often my plays tend to be five minutes longer than they ought to be, and if I’m around I can help choose which five minutes they take out — I have a vote.

	"I’m hoping to have a play this year, by Christmas, but it’s not about English academics, I’ll tell you that."

Q: The obvious question about this fairly esoteric play, is whether American audiences will get it — I bet most people won’t get the first joke about "belaying painters" [a reference both to Ruskin’s art criticism and to boating].

A: No, but that’s also true in England. Don’t imagine that there’s an audience in England that will get all the references and one in America that will get none. A number of allusions will resonate with a British audience, but the play of course doesn’t depend on any particular reference.

Q: Does working with American rather than British actors make a difference?

A: There is not nearly so much difference as there used to be — of course some of the difficulty has to do with accent, but there is so much cross-pollination now, that the differences are no longer so striking.

Q: Elsewhere you called Housman "heroic" — what did you mean by that?

A: He seemed to believe — and I also believe this — that knowledge is good for its own sake. Useless knowledge is also good. Useless knowledge may actually be more heroic since there’s nothing in it for you — except Housman was anxious to leave a monument to himself, and in the world which he lived in his monument was a definitive edition of a Latin poet who was barely worth reading. It’s a paradox, yes, but it’s an expression of what I was just hinting at, knowledge doesn’t have to be useful to have dignity.

But when I called him heroic, I was really thinking of the way he suffered through — if that’s a phrase I can use — he suffered through with his choice, which was to make himself the greatest scholar of his generation and nothing got in the way of that.

He was notoriously rude and contemptuous of what he took to be a kind of dishonesty, people who were fudging, lying to themselves — he set himself as a moralist as well as a scholar-critic. His professional life was a moral adventure in a way, against self-deception.

Q: Although I suppose in some way he deceived himself emotionally. Taking the narrow view, Housman refused to live. It’s a strange kind of heroism.

A: It is a strange sort of heroism — I only meant that he stuck to the work through thick and thin, he was as hard on himself as he was on other people. In other words, he had very high standards and he applies them to himself first.

Q: This is clearly one of your "project" plays — where you read and read and then a play comes out of it. What’s the latest project?

A: I’m nowhere with it, so there’s not much to talk about — I’m hoping to have a play this year, by Christmas, but it’s not about English academics, I’ll tell you that. It’s actually about Russia —19th-century Russia — I’ll go so far as to say that. But, as I say, I’m floundering in massive research.

Q: You’ve shown us all these years your mind at work.

A: Well, next time I’m hoping to come up with a story that requires no research. The Real Thing is coming back. It struck me when I saw it in London — gosh, how easy it was in those days when all I had to do was sit down and start writing instead of first reading for a year and a half.