A Stropshire Lad on the Great White Way.

ELLENZWEIG, ALLEN

The Invention of Love

A new play by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Jack O'Brien

At the Lyceum Theatre, New York

JOHN Simon, the brilliant but bilious theater critic, recently complained on PBS's Charlie Rose of the increasing trend toward "the homosexual play," a category he never defined except to denounce its "smuggling in" of "special pleading." This complaint would seem more suitable to the 1950's, the era of Tennessee Williams and William Inge, than to an age in which people like Tony Kushner and Terence McNally hardly need to shilly-shally about their characters'--or their own--predilections. Now, with Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, we have at least one more thorn with which to prick Mr. Simon's side, a play whose central figure, the renowned classical scholar and poet A. E. Housman, recalls on his deathbed the great personal drama of his Victorian youth, his unrequited love for a robust, athletic classmate, Moses Jackson.

The opening scene is set on the River Styx, with Housman being rowed to the other side by the boatman Charon. From here the play glides seamlessly backward in time to the idyllic Oxford of the late 1870's, where a younger Housman and his friend Pollard are being rowed along by their sporty chum Jackson. These two settings will in turn drift back and forth to London and the English countryside. Significant figures of the period make appearances in the play, including John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the Oxford dons whose aesthetic ideas would so influence Housman's generation; Oscar Wilde; Benjamin Jowett, the conservative and bowdlerizing classicist; and Henry Labouchere, the liberal politician whose notorious amendment to the British Criminal Law of 1885 would provide the grounds for Wilde's imprisonment a decade later.

The play proceeds on two tracks, one of which elaborates Housman's stance as a classicist: his defense of scrupulous textual accuracy in translation from the Greek or Latin, and his insistence on the value of knowledge for its own sake. Here Stoppard does quite of bit of showing off, having both the young and old Housman quoting Catullus, Horace, and Propertius in the original Latin, thereby striking terror into the hearts of audience members who assume they're missing something crucial (though translations are usually provided). The second track follows Housman's romantic devotion and fall in his platonic friendship with Jackson, which is a source of both succor and torment for him. This becomes the focus of Housman's elegiac poetry, as he loses the object of his affection to the middle-class, heterosexual aims of the unassuming, science-minded-and heterosexual-Jackson, who mocks esthetes and fails to realize that his friend is in love with him.

Stoppard's aged (indeed, dead) Housman, with his flashy prolixity, is brought to life by the brilliant, outsized performance of Richard Easton, who plays the intellectual superiority with rigorous grandeur even as the broken heart beating beneath is revealed in quick flashes. But if Easton must play Housman as a lion in winter, it is left for Robert Sean Leonard to show us the young Housman, an emotionally cautious youth whose ideals and heart have not yet hardened. Leonard delivers a performance equal to Easton's, full of restraint, intensity, and intelligence.

The play's climax comes at last in a scene in which a chance observation forces young Housman to admit to his straight-arrow companion the depth of his ardor, repressed for all these years. He then admits in a verse from A Shropshire Lad, "I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder / And went with half my life about my ways." Here The Invention of Love moves past the chilly lyricism of Stoppard's earlier play Arcadia or the crowd-pleasing wit of his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, to a genuinely tear-inducing warmth.

Near the end of the second act, Stoppard brings on Oscar Wilde after the playwright's fall from grace. In a brief but savvy performance, Daniel Davis (yes, the butler from The Nanny) gives us Wilde as an exemplar of Walter Pater's famous injunction, "To burn always, with this hard, gemlike flame." Wilde is shown to be the brave iconoclast willing to shake up society, while Housman is posited to be the closeted intellectual, unable to satisfy his heart's desire, only his head's. Necessary as it is to give Wilde his due-he defined an age, and it was the age in which Housman came to maturity-the scene proposes to cut Housman down to size even though he's been presented thus far as intellectually heroic, if romantically tragic.

Much credit goes to Jack O'Brien's direction and Bob Crowley's sets for keeping the play moving despite the dense verbal pyrotechnics. Indeed, Crowley's visual contribution is enormous, rendering the stage as dark and forbidding as necessary when the old Housman is entering the netherworld, while bringing to life the dreamy, sunny utopia of boating and bicycling in young Housman's Oxford circa 1880, or the theatrical sparkle of the newly electrified London stage.

Stoppard has undoubtedly "smuggled in" empathy for his main character, which may qualify The Invention of Love for the particular category that John Simon found so objectionable, but it does make for a very moving testament to the homosexual dilemma of an earlier age. If this is "special pleading," I hope Stoppard pleads guilty.