Playwright Tom Stoppard talks about his play The Invention of Love which is coming soon to the Oxford Playhouse

DR: What does it mean for you to have The Invention of Love put on in Oxford, in this way?

TS: It was my best Christmas present.

DR: That’s brilliant – it is a play set in Oxford… TS: Well it’s largely because I’m fond of the play, and I think I enjoyed writing it more than any other play.

DR: Why was that?

TS: Well I think it’s because Housman combines in subject matter and in tone of voice two areas which, first of all, fascinate me and suit me as a writer. A play about a Latin scholar which gets into the Latin is now what’s called a bit of a challenge, and I suppose that Oxford is one of the places where that subject matter is being seen and listened to in exactly the right context. But I should add firstly that it was quite clear in practice that the play works on an emotional level rather than an intellectual level, which is to say that the play was widely liked not just in London, but in New York also, and that wouldn’t have been so had it not been that they play was working as, in the broadest sense, a love story. And, leaving aside the sexual orientation and so forth, I identify with it quite strongly; I enjoyed writing it and I loved the practical work of helping to rehearse it and put it on. And in both cases – in both London and New York – you know, it was a happy experience, and I suppose for reasons that are fairly obvious, it’s not a play that are most people’s, most producer’s favourite! And I was absolutely delighted to find that a production was being rooted at Oxford and I felt that the play had fallen into the right hands. And so I’m really pleased about it.

DR: I picked up on two things you said – the first of which was that it was an emotional play rather than an intellectual play. When the play was put on in New York, a reviewer said that the play was so obscure that even the title didn’t refer to love, but to a love poem! I thought this was completely missing the point – the play is a love story, that it’s set in Oxford is large part of that.

TS: It’s about a man who falls in love when he’s an undergraduate and essentially remains enthralled by an impossible unrequited love for the rest of his life.

DR: You also said that the play wasn’t some people’s favourite and that it was quite a difficult play; it is a difficult play but I think that it’s very pertinent that it be put on in Oxford, because I think it still speaks truths about the Oxford experience today. And that’s something with you now. What I got from the play was this dichotomy between Oxford as a place of great scholarship, “Oxford in the Golden Age”, as it’s referred to in the last lines of the play, and this threat of industrialization, the train from London to Birmingham. There’s a great bit at the beginning of the play: Pattison says “Great reform made us into a cramming shop. The railway brings in the fools and takes them away with their tickets punched for the world outside. It’s less about Oxford students as Classics scholars, more about, especially today, Oxford students as potential management consultants. I’m referring specifically to experiences I’ve recently had, in my final year, applying for jobs. My favourite line of the play is the last one – ‘How lucky to find myself standing on this empty shore, with the indifferent waters at my feet.

TS: Well it certainly does strike that kind of chord. There are people who would say, with some justice, that it wouldn’t be healthy for Oxford or any other university to insulate itself from what we might call ‘the real world’, in inverted commas and so forth. But I have to explain to you that plays don’t get written, at least in my case, with some kind of thesis in advance. It’s not that the play carries out an author’s thesis – one is simply going along with the play on the level of human character; and in the case of a play based on historical characters, one is also moving along, as it were, on a historical narrative. I think that what you’ve just referred to, the industrial age invading Oxford, or Oxford existing to punch the tickets for people who are then going to make their way in a very different kind of world…I couldn’t dissent from what you’ve said, but it would be wrong to suppose that that was what I was after, that that was the point I was after making. Really and truly, every play needs a point of origin, a spark which tells the writer that there’s a play here – and in my case, there were no ramifications involved, other than the simple core of the matter which was that the classical and the romantic were here combined in one life, and in a way the two halves were fighting each other in some sense. Or, if you like, the scholar and the poet were taking turns to live a single life.

DR: At the beginning of the play AEH is described as both a scholar and poet and the reaction is something like – “what, at the same time?”

TS: Yes, at the same time, I would resist, because, you know, that’s what writers are like, I would resist the idea that anybody would consciously write what you call ‘a difficult play’; plays are not supposed to be difficult – certainly there are different kinds of audiences which suit plays better or worse. Even that is a thought which I rather resist; I like the thought instead that one tries to write well, and plays are good, bad or indifferent, and the good ones cut across all the categories, as the bad ones cut across all the categories, and I would rather spend the evening at a great production of a French farce than an indifferent production of Hamlet. It’s all to do with how good theatre can be when it tries to be – I’m talking about the theatre as a whole, I’m talking about everything from light cues to the actor’s soliloquy. So, to me, I’d be sorry to think of it, or I’d be sorry if people thought it was a difficult play, because part of the fun is to take something which sounds difficult like Latin scholarship, and make it intelligible and interesting, and, one hopes, fun – because I think theatre is a recreation.

DR: Of course. Some of the criticism I’ve read seems to suggest that people forget that The Invention of Love is a comedy as well.

TS: Well I hope so, certainly, my experience of the play in production is that the audience laughs quite a lot – sometimes more than you’d expect, or indeed, more than I’d expect. I like jokes.

DR: Yes – I’ve seen the production in rehearsal, and Roger [Granville, the director] has really brought that out. And actually the cast has got some brilliant names in it, especially with characters like Labouchere, who is played by a big guy with a booming voice; Roger is playing on this side massively. You’ve met Roger, he’s exceptionally theatrical.

TS: I think what one wants most of all is that the director is somebody who just loves the play and has responded to it, and so I’m very pleased about that. It seems to me that it is you who have the hardest job!

DR: Yes, well we’re doing very well! Roger’s very optimistic and wants to sell out every night; I’m certainly going with that!

TS: It’s the only attitude to have.

DR: Exactly. I’d like to bring us back to the play, and ask you the character of Oscar Wilde to be really very interesting. Apart from Housman who is of course the protagonist, and his story is the story of the play to an extent, Wilde is very much in the wings, he’s a continual presence on and off stage. Housman in the age of Wilde: what’s the relationship between the two?

TS: Well, everything’s about character. Wilde was audacious and flamboyant about everything, including his sexuality; Housman was cautious and much more under the sway of the morality of the time, and full of…well I don’t know, it’s quite presumptious to say what Housman was full of – how do I know?...but my sense of it is that he was full of caution, anxiety, agony I would say too. And, again, it wasn’t that I set out to make a thesis of the contrast, it’s just that one tries to be true to the characters one is writing, and that’s what you end up with. Wilde, who was not apologetic about the course he’d taken, or chosen, and there’s a moment when Housman expresses sympathy for Wilde when he says you’ve lived at the wrong time, you should have lived in Megara when one could publish poetry to the boy one loved, and so on, and Wilde rejects this attempt to sympathize with him; he says, you know, on the contrary, this world, this England, at this time, where he, as it were, exhibited his values and people paid attention to him.

DR: “Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light”

TS: That’s right. Housman was frightened by the burst of light, and paid for it. Again, it’s presumptious to talk about Housman as though one knew what was going on inside of him, but to all the evidence, he remained faithful to that first flame of passion, and he knew it was hopeless. And I suppose he may have even had to transcend the world’s opinion of him, of the love that dare not speak it’s name; he transcended himself. Listen: I’m blabbering on like this as though I had all these intentions! One writes line by line, one tries not to make it boring, frankly, but I had a wonderful time doing the necessary reading – reading Pater and Ruskin and trying to weave my way through Housman’s classical papers and so on, and I think of it as being the most enjoyable research, I suppose you should call it, that I’ve ever undertaken, I mean I had to stop reading because I was running out of time.

DR: Sounds like me and my dissertation! You had to research the Oxford lifestyle, too, the characters of Jowett and so forth…

TS: Yes, but it was also about trying to figure out what Housman actually did as a classical scholar; I said goodbye to Latin and Greek when I was in the Sixth Form, which was a long time ago! It got me back into Latin, to some extent, I benefited personally from having written the play, and I met some very nice Latinists in the process.

DR: It is a play which does have this classical bent, it’s a very literary play. However, as you’ve suggested, and I completely agree with you, this itself is not to suggest that it should be a difficult play, or that it should be necessarily elitist. In fact the real message is less that it’s a play about Latin scholars that it’s about undergraduates at Oxford…

TS: Undergraduate life, and so on – absolutely. By the way, I did see the play done in German once, but it’s not a play which is widely done, and I’m really thrilled that somebody’s doing it.

Stoppard's The Invention of Love is running from February 17-20 at the Oxford Playhouse To book tickets, visit the Playhouse Website www.oxfordplayhouse.com , or call the Box Office on 01865 305 305.