From jbutrica@morgan.ucs.mun.ca Sun Apr 1 12:13:28 2001 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.03) with ESMTP id f31JDR229420 for ; Sun, 1 Apr 2001 12:13:27 -0700 Received: from cerberus.ucs.mun.ca (cerberus.ucs.mun.ca [134.153.2.162]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.03) with ESMTP id f31JDR715761 for ; Sun, 1 Apr 2001 12:13:27 -0700 Received: from [134.153.128.98] (drusus.clas.mun.ca [134.153.128.98]) by cerberus.ucs.mun.ca (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA07129 for ; Sun, 1 Apr 2001 16:43:24 -0230 (NDT) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 16:43:24 -0230 (NDT) X-Sender: jbutrica@pop.morgan.ucs.mun.ca Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <2cbebe12cbf3ee.2cbf3ee2cbebe1@homemail.nyu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable To: classics@u.washington.edu From: James Butrica Subject: Re: The Invention of Love >I was invited this evening to see Stoppard's "The Invention of Love," of >which I have included the NYTimes review below. I am too entranced to >say more now than that it is heart-breaking and side-splitting in >language and ideas; to see, breathtakingly, ravishingly beautiful. > >DW Enviously, I offer the following review of Brantley's review. March 30, 2001 > > THEATER REVIEW > > 'Invention of Love': Housman's Hell, Stoppard's > Style > > By BEN BRANTLEY > the newly deceased A. E. Housman, Unless the director failed to understand the clear meaning of the last pages of the play, AEH shouldn't be dead til the very end; this has been only one in a series of underworld fantasies that he has imagined. > classicist extraordinaire. Does anyone know what this phrase might possibly mean? Whom among classicists past and present would we ourselves honour with such a soubriquet? Wilamowitz? Hell, in other > words, turns out to be an old-style > academic's dream of a cocktail party. Oh, I guess *that's* why I enjoy it so much, *old-style* thing that I am; I'm trying hard not to feel offended, Mr Brantley. >It is also a blessing that the director is Jack O'Brien, whose credits >include, >of all things, the Broadway musical "The Full Monty" I don't suppose Housman would necessarily be offended, especially if it was switched from Pittsburg to Venice and the men were gondoliers ... >The staging captures Mr. Stoppard's brimming self-delight >and enthusiasm, and it avoids the didactic dustiness that overwhelmed the >stateside premiere last year at the American Conservatory Theater in San >>Francisco. Is it physically possible for "dustiness" to "overwhelm"? Still, it would be fascinating to know how the play was turned into a crashing bore. > Beginning with the 77-year-old Housman poised to enter the underworld, No, Mr Brantley, that's how it ends ... >So we spend time with Oxford dons (Ruskin, Pater and Jowett are the best >known) >who discuss both the corruptions of classical translation. The what??? I don't think you read those explanatory notes carefully enough, Mr. Brantley. Did Dryden and Fitzgerald and Lee take bribes in connection with their work??? (Feigned denseness alert.) >young Housman, who hopelessly and cautiously loved a fellow Oxonian, Well, it's nice he took "precautions," especially since he was evidently so "hopeless" at it. >"Invention" can seem irritatingly arcane A good one for the marquee! >At the core of the play is an unsettling dualism. It's evident in the >opening >moments when the joke- cracking Charon (an enjoyably hammy Jeff >Weiss) tells >the dead Housman that they're still waiting for another >passenger. Charon was >told, it seems, to expect "a poet and a scholar." >Housman answers, "I think >that must be me." A sense of the double self, >and the difficulties of >reconciling opposing forces, Actually it's a hoary old clich=E9 about Housman that Stoppard seems to suggest is a false problem. >The young Housman doesn't recognize his older self, of course, Yes, it's only in insurance commercials that one recognizes oneself when one at 20 meets oneself at 65. > (One wishes that Mr. Harbour's loutish Jackson, the inspiration for all >those >Hellenic boys of Shropshire, seemed a bit more worthy of desire.) "Hellenic Boys of Shropshire"????? Has Mr Brantley ever read "A Shropshire Lad"? Or was this the name of some British pictorial magazine of the 1950s? >Unless you're a student of both classics and Edwardian England, I can't >promise >that you won't occasionally be lost or even numbed during parts >of "The >Invention of Love." Is that *good* numbed or *bad* numbed? >But this production has a fluid, glistening quality that will carry you >along >if you don't resist it. But surely the mind should at least be encouraged to engage with it. Stoppard goes to extraordinary lengths to make all of this as accessible as it could possible be. >the impossibility of truly knowing anything, whether it's a Latin text >obscured >by years of emendations I think Mr Brantley has nodded off again. On the contrary: if we don't feel that the emendations "endorsed" in the play -- like freti for feri in Cat. 64 -- really and truly are the original readings written by the authors themselves, then something has gone wrong with the production or the performance. And if an emendation makes a text more obscure, nobody's going to adopt it! James Lawrence Peter Butrica Department of Classics Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, Newfoundland A1C 5S7 (709) 737-7914 .