Almost any list of top contemporary playwights has to include Britain’s Sir Tom Stoppard.
And yet, as far as I know, no New York theater has ever staged Stoppard’s acclaimed 1997 play “The Invention of Love.”
It would have made a nice choice to open the new Broadway home of Todd Haimes’s Roundabout Theater on 42nd Street — but no, the good old Roudabout, which just acquired a new corporate sponsor, American Airlines, played it safe, flying instead with Sir Derek Jacobi in another Chekhov, this time “Uncle Vanya.”
Ironically, the new theater could not get airborne in time, so this “Vanya” jetted off to another Broadway house. Next up at the Roundabout is — wait, gosh, gasp! — Nathan Lane in “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”
So the Stoppard banner this season will be raised solely by a revival production of his “The Real Thing” at the Ethel Barrymore, opening April 17.
Meanwhile, after “The Invention of Love” was done this year in San Francisco, the play will be seen on the East Coast only in Philadelphia at the Wilma Theater.
Doesn’t anyone have the courage to bring it to New York?
The reluctance to mount “Invention” here is strange. The play is totally engrossing — with a certain resemblance to the uniquely theatrical “Arcadia.”
Stoppard, who last year won an Oscar for penning “Shakespeare in Love,” is certainly not likely to turn his play into a Hollywood script. The dream world of forbidden love and punctilious academia revealed in “The Invention of Love” would not translate to the screen.
It’s as theatrical as a spotlight.
The drama is a spiritual biography of A.E. Housman, an Edwardian poet and Oxbridge scholar best remembered for his first book of poems, “A Shropshire Lad.” The collection enjoyed a huge popular following during the first half of the past century.
The play is romantic and funny, despite dealing extensely with death. It opens with Housman in a dream in which he’s being picked up by Charon to be ferried across the River Styx to Hades.
Stoppard’s 77-year-old scholar poet, played by Martin Rayner, encounters his younger self (Mark Alhadeff) and revisits his days at Oxford.
He also reflects on the academic squabbles of his later years and reveals that his presumably celibate life was touched by a suppressed and unreciprocated love for a fellow student, a scientist and sportsman named Moses Jackson (Ian Merrill Peakes).
Nothing is quite clear, however. The older A.E., as he is called in the program, vaults between his past and present in a collage/montage, switching this way and that in no particular sequence — something Stoppard called “the dream warp of the ultimate room.”
But what does he mean by the title, “The Invention of Love”?
To invent originally meant to find, which Stoppard, having peppered this play with Latin tags and Greek quotations, surely knew. Yet there is also the modern concept of invention as creation.
It appears that Stoppard is exploring not just what Housman found out about love but also what that unrequited love itself invented.
Luckily, it is a play that’s easier to enjoy than follow. Stoppard shows his crackling wit, and his vignettes of 19th-century England, along with his incisive characterizations, are a delight.
I did not see the play at London’s National Theater, but I find it difficult to envisage a better staging, both in Blanka Ziska’s superbly idiomatic direction and the work of the wonderfully imaginative design team of Michael McGarty (sets), Russell H. Champa (lighting), Janus Stefanowicz (costumes) and Adam Wernick (sound).
Add to this the authoritative acting, particularly Rayner as the sarcastic yet ironically genial older Housman, and you have an evening of theatrical fireworks.
This is Stoppard’s cleverest play but better yet, the one in which cleverness matters least.
We may as well continue on the British line of theater and add a few words of personal gratitude to the universal praise already heaped upon Simon McBurney and his Theatre de la Complicite from London.
This is for their indelibly memorable collaboration with the Emerson String Quartet on the Lincoln Center production of “The Noise of Time” at John Jay College Auditorium.
The Theatre de la Complicite has become one of New York’s favorite British tourists. This is their third or fourth visit in as many years, and their compellingly allusive dramatization of Shostakovich’s 15th and final String Quartet proved a leap of creative imagination that in its way was oddly similar to Stoppard’s “Invention.”
A life is pinpointed and revealed — and here that life is transfigured into the grave and spectral peformance by the wondrous Emerson Quartet.
Here, again, you might think of an artist on the threshold of death musing on the past while waiting for the ferryman and the long, lost journey across the Styx.