from Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 24, Number 2

Translating The Invention of Love: The Journey From Page to Stage For Tom Stoppard's Latest Play

Carrie Ryan

Literary Manager, La Jolla Playhouse

Carrie Ryan, "Translating The Invention of Love: The Journey from Page to Stage For Tom Stoppard's Latest Play," Journal of Modern Literature, XXIV, 2 (Winter 2000-2001), pp. 197-204. ©Indiana University Press, 2001.

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In February and March of 2000, The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia took its patrons on an intellectually and emotionally ambitious journey into a man's mind, a journey that begins on the banks of the River Styx and takes both characters and audience to the halls of Victorian Oxford, the streets of Industrial Revolution London, and the melancholy of the French seashore. The Invention of Love marks the fourth—and arguably most challenging—play by Tom Stoppard to appear on the Wilma stage. The production was ultimately as successful as it was challenging, and the road to that success began with Stoppard's script for the play.

The Invention of Love centers around A.E. Housman, the Classical scholar and poet. In 1936, Housman, or AEH as he is referred to in the play, is seventy-seven years old, infirm, and living in the Evelyn Nursing Home at Cambridge, where he is also Benjamin Hall Kennedy Professor of Latin. On the last night of his life, he dreams that he is dead. His dream takes him first to the banks of the River Styx, where the mythical boatman Charon arrives to ferry him to the underworld. On this journey, AEH sees himself as a young man newly matriculated at Oxford. Not only is young Housman struggling to navigate the various schools of thought battling at Oxford at the time—John Ruskin's esteem for the Gothic, Walter Pater's appreciation of the Renaissance, Benjamin Jowett's advancement of Classical education as training for a life in public service—but he also is struggling with his feelings for Moses Jackson, a science student and athlete whom he loved with a ìlove that dare not speak its name.î Act One culminates in an encounter between AEH and Housman during which they discuss the purpose of a Classical education, the value of textual criticism, and the power of poetry. Through this meeting, young Housman arrives at two realizations: that there is no pursuit more noble or valuable than that of adding ìto what is knownî1 by restoring Classical texts and that he is undeniably, unrequitedly in love with Jackson.

Act Two expands the world of the play as Housman, having failed his examinations, takes a job in London reviewing trademark applications for the Patent Office, where Moses Jackson also works as an Examiner of Electrical Specifications. In Oxford, the power brokers are the professors, legislating not just academics but morality; in London, these arbiters are journalists. Henry Labouchere, W.T. Stead, and Frank Harris banter over their involvement in the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, the law under which Oscar Wilde was found guilty of acts of gross indecency and sentenced to two years at hard labor in 1896. Housman's feelings mount, and he confronts an unreceptive and uncomfortable Jackson. After this confrontation, young Housman fades from the play, shifting focus almost exclusively to AEH, who ultimately writes A Shropshire Lad and becomes the most important Classical scholar of the period. As the play draws to a close, AEH meets Oscar Wilde, and these two figures—both gay, Classically-educated, Victorian-era poets—compare their life choices. Wilde chose to pursue his love for Lord Alfred Douglas and ended his life alone, destitute, and broken. Housman, without an outlet for his love, became a revered poet and scholar, with a chair at Cambridge and a volume of poems that was carried in almost every English soldier's breast pocket during World War I.

Since the play follows a poet more famous in Britain than here, a scholar whose field of expertise is too specialized for most laymen, The Invention of Love is not the most obvious choice to produce at a theater on this side of the Atlantic. After the play's successful run at London's Royal National Theatre, Stoppard, director Blanka Zizka, and myself (the show's dramaturg) were determined to ensure that the production would be as successful—in every way—for our Philadelphia audiences. In early 2000, when the Wilma was rehearsing the East Coast premiere of The Invention of Love, the American premiere of the play was happening almost concurrently in San Francisco. Tom Stoppard was closely involved with both productions, and this involvement resulted in two very different productions of the play—the script itself varied between the two theaters.

Any theatrical production is an act of translation. The playwright, an originating artist, begins the process by creating a text, but in order for this text to be realized as a play, a work of art in real time on a stage, the writer must hand over this work to a team of interpretive artists. The director is responsible for conceiving an overall interpretation of the script that guides the transition from page to stage. Each actor creates an individual character (or in the case of the Wilma production of The Invention of Love, some actors may create multiple characters). Designers build a physical world—set, lighting, sound, costumes—that supports and enables the director's conception. Finally, the dramaturg acts as the playwright's surrogate throughout the rehearsal process, when it is often not possible for the writer to be present. The dramaturg protects the integrity of the text and ensures that the director's interpretation serves that text well, while working closely with the director to realize most fully her interpretation.

The Invention of Love, owing to its particular subject matter and setting, presents a trio of translational challenges. First, Stoppard's play is set in fin-de-siècle England; certain references throughout the play can have a decidedly foreign feel for a millennial American audience. Second, characters throughout the play speak Latin and ancient Greek. These languages must, in some way, be reconciled with the English of the play in order to present the play as a single, unified whole. Finally, there is the challenge of turning a piece of literature, one hundred two pages of words on paper, into a living, immediate, coherent piece of theater. Only by tackling all three of these translation challenges was a successful production of The Invention of Love possible.

* * * *

In preparing The Invention of Love for an American audience, we made a variety of changes to the published text of the play. Director Blanka Zizka began working with Tom Stoppard early in 1999 to shape the text, and I joined their deliberations in the fall as we approached our first rehearsal in January 2000. It was rather inspiring to work with Stoppard on this often tedious process of going over the play line-by-line in order to ensure that our audience would have access to the greater part of its tapestry. He came to the table not as the author of a published, fixed text but as a man of the theater who was interested in, and committed to, making the East Coast premiere of his play as immediate and effective for a Philadelphia audience as the original production had been for a British audience.

Most of the changes we made in the text ultimately were small. The bulk of the play is clear upon close inspection; we found ourselves worried instead about many of the chatty colloquialisms that characters use in the play, idiomatic constructions that could ring foreign in American ears and jolt audience members out of the world we were trying to create. For example, at the play's emotional center, when Housman reveals his feelings to Jackson, the latter confronts Housman about his friendship with a fellow at the Patent Office who is rumored to be gay. After stumbling through his insinuation, Jackson apologizes, ìI know I'm all hobnails.î Not an idiom used here, and not one whose meaning can be easily divined, the phrase, ìall hobnails,î we learned from Stoppard, is meant to convey a sort of well-meant clumsiness. In our version, Jackson instead says, ìYou know I'm all thumbs,î a small adjustment that still conveys his awkwardness and good intentions.

Stoppard was particularly interested in adjusting the text when a joke was at stake. In this case, the laughs were not simply for laughs' sake. With a piece as intellectually and emotionally dense as this, each lighter moment becomes all the more important for pace and shape. Nothing draws an audience member into a piece like a joke that comes across, a moment of shared humor that galvanizes actors and audience in a communal journey. One of our worries was that the people in the audience, having heard that the play was centered around a Victorian Classical scholar and poet, would arrive at the theater thinking that they had little in common with this world (which, of course, is not the case since the play presents a fundamentally human rendering of a man's coming to terms with his life's choices). Humor can go a long way toward including an audience, and each joke was an important way of reinforcing the fact that the audience and the characters in the play were sharing the same space and the same journey for three hours in a theater.

Early in the play, AEH says of a fellow Classicist's translation of Sophocles that ìthe responsibility for reading the metre seems to have been handed over to the Gas, Light and Coke Companyî (p. 3). We streamlined this quip, making it simply ìGas Company,î a familiar utility. In another example, at the top of Act Two, Housman tells Jackson a story about his job in the Trade Marks Registry. Stoppard had built a joke around a giraffe used to advertise sore throat lozenges, and both director Blanka Zizka and myself had trouble understanding it. The joke as written reads,

I had sore throat lozenges today, an application to register a wonderfully woebegone giraffe—raised rather a subtle point in Trade Marks regulation, actually: it seems there is already a giraffe at large, wearing twelve styles of celluloid collar, but, and here's the nub, a happy giraffe, in fact a preening self-satisfied giraffe. The question arises—is the registered giraffe Platonic?, are all God's giraffes in esse et in posse to be rendered unto the Houndsditch Novelty Collar Company? (p. 53)

In this case, it was not the use of Latin but the structure of the joke that gave us pause. We told Stoppard that phrases such as ìcelluloid collarî were confusing, and that it was not entirely clear to us from the joke as written that both giraffes were being used for advertising. As we explained our confusion, he explained his intention, and we fashioned another version of the joke:

I had an application today for a wonderfully woebegone giraffe—to advertise lozenges for sore throats, naturally—which, however raised rather a subtle point in Trade Marks regulation, because it seems there is already a giraffe registered to advertise twelve styles of shirt collar. But, and here's the nub, that's a happy giraffe. So the question arises—is the registered giraffe Platonic?, are all God's giraffes in esse et in posse to be spoken for by the Houndsditch Shirt Collar Company?

Stoppard made no similar change in San Francisco, and while our new version of the joke was on many nights quite funny, Stoppard more than once let us know that the joke as he had written it got laughs from San Francisco audiences.

We simply cut several other Britishisms in the play. The early twentieth-century Oxford that appears in the play is a world unto itself, a university system wherein many elements do not have equivalents in our own system. When Professor Mark Pattison welcomes the boys to Oxford, he says to them, ìWe have bought you, and we're running you in two plates, Mods and the Finalsî (p. 8). Rather than struggling to find some way to explain Mods and Finals through added text, program notes, or acting virtuosity, we chose instead to cut the line. Pattison's cynicism about the Oxford educational system is already well apparent when he says, just a line before this, ìif you have come to Oxford with the idea of getting knowledge, you must give that up at once.î Housman and his friends later joke about Mods, and we cut that reference as well, along with specific references to rowing at Oxford. England's lower school system has its own jargon as well, so when Housman's sister refers to ìSixth Formî (p. 50), we substituted simply ìclass.î Again, we were guided in these changes by the pursuit of clarity without sacrificing the spirit and sense of any given moment.

Some further adjustments pertained to the historical figures who populate the play. All of the characters in The Invention of Love, save one, are based on actual people who lived, many of whom are more popularly familiar in Britain than they are here. The great Victorian art critic John Ruskin appears in the play, and in the first scene Stoppard establishes a pun at his expense. Charon approaches AEH and asks him to ìbelay the painterî (p. 1)—that is, to moor his boat to the dock. Making conversation, AEH then says, ìI heard Ruskin lecture in my first term at Oxford. Painters belayed on every sideî (p. 1). We added the phrase ìon artî after ìlectureî to help the audience make the connection between Ruskin's academic pursuits and the ìpaintersî whom AEH mentions. Later, Ruskin talks about ìan Irish exquisite, a great slab of a youth with white hands and long poetical hairî (p. 15). Since the spectre of Oscar Wilde and his aestheticism runs through the play, we underlined this moment by adding the phrase, ìOscar, they called him,î to Ruskin's speech. We wanted whenever possible to reinforce the context of this world and to help the audience place the play's various characters within this context.

One of the changes we made was truly fundamental, affecting the structure of the play. Jerome K. Jerome's novel Three Men in a Boat informs the play. When AEH first spies his younger self, Housman is with his friends Jackson and Pollard, rowing on the Thames with a dog in his lap. Much of their dialogue—ìPull on your right, Jackson.î ìDo you want to take the oars?î ìNo, you're doing splendidlyî (p. 4)—evokes the novel. Late in Act Two, Jerome himself appears in a boat with journalist Frank Harris and Housman's friend Chamberlain (the play's one invented character), and they discuss the fates of both Housman and Oscar Wilde. We worried that Jerome was truly an obscure figure to most Americans; certainly, prior to doing research, no one working on the show knew much about him. Jerome identifies himself in the play as ìthe editor of a popular newspaperî (p. 85), and immediately prior to his entrance there is a scene featuring the three journalists who appear through Act 2. Why, if Jerome is a journalist, does he not appear in these scenes? For those not familiar with Jerome and his novel, learning that he is a journalist might prove problematic since he is not a part of the scenes with Harris, W.T. Stead, and Henry Labouchere. He appears only once, in one of the play's more dreamlike scenes. Rather than risk alienating the members of our audience so near the end of the play, after they have worked consistently to navigate Greek and Latin in a setting distant in both time and place, we cut the scene in which Jerome appears.

This cut necessitated some reshaping of AEH's penultimate monologue. In it, he explains that Jerome wrote an article that led Lord Alfred ìDouglas' father into leaving a card at the Albermarle Club, ëto Oscar Wilde, posing as a Sodomite.' From which all that followed, followedî (p. 101). On a dramaturgical level, the connection between Jerome, whose novel influences the structure of the play, and Wilde, whose aestheticism is posited as an alternative to Housman's choices, is seductive, lifting the dream play from subconscious ramblings to a careful crafted examination of a man's life through the times in which he lived. If the audience does not know Jerome, however, the revelation of this connection can feel more like a lecture than a discovery. For many of the same reasons that we cut the scene in which Jerome appears, we ended up excising his presence from the play entirely. It certainly was not a necessary cut—few of the textual changes which we made were—but we felt, and Stoppard agreed to allow us to try, that the play without Jerome still preserved the essence of the play which Stoppard wrote.

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* * * *
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For most readers—and by most, I mean those without an intimate knowledge of both Latin and ancient Greek—a preliminary perusal of The Invention of Love can be frustrating. Although the play opens with the familiar mythological boatman Charon, a friendly and unpretentious introduction to this Classical world, characters soon begin exchanging snippets of Latin. This can be disorienting, but usually the Latin is presented in a way that accommodates the reader, as when Moses Jackson asks his friend Pollard, "What is 'trochum?'" to which Pollard replies, "A hoop, in the accusative" (p. 6). Not only is trochum defined, but Jackson's query signals to the audience that an ignorance of Latin is acceptable when experiencing this play.

Reading the play poses a particular challenge. Latin, at least, uses our own Arabic alphabet, allowing a reader of the script to preserve a semblance of the rhythm and sound of the play's language. In his second exchange with Charon, however, AEH speaks the play's first of two passages of ancient Greek:

This passage stops the flow of the text. On the page, there is no way of perceiving the musicality of the language without a fluent familiarity with this foreign alphabet.

Stoppard uses Greek and Latin throughout the play, however, not to alienate his audience, but because these languages are a fundamental part of the world of these characters. Whether he is studying Classics at Oxford or pursuing a chair at a university, Latin and ancient Greek are the meat of the textual criticism that dominates Housman's intellectual life. It would be irresponsible to omit such references from the play. As an aid to the audience, Stoppard almost always translates the passages which he quotes in the play, either immediately prior to or just after a reference. The Greek from AEH's exchange with Charon, for example, is from Aeschylus' lost play, The Myrmidons, and before AEH recites the Greek, Charon tells us that the line in English is, "Does it mean nothing to you the unblemished thighs I worshipped and the shower of kisses you had from me" (p. 28).

As a dramaturg, it is often my job to put myself in the place of the audience and attempt to experience a play as if I were watching it for the first time. By doing this, I can let the director know what is clear and what is confusing, what resonates with me and what pulls me out of this piece. I know that as an audience member, I often experience a small moment of panic when encountering an unfamiliar phrase or reference in a play. In my struggle to understand what has just been said, I can be pulled out of the world. It was important to us with The Invention of Love that the Greek and Latin not act as obstacles to understanding and enjoying this world, but that these languages become a part of the world. This play demands a degree of trust from an audience. If the audience believes that there is both rhyme and reason to what the playwright is doing, it will listen to the Latin and Greek without panic, waiting for such references to be placed into a context, as they invariably are in this play.

Working on the play, we found that the translation which we had to do of the Greek and Latin was unusual, because it was not directly for the benefit of the audience. Often, for the benefit of the actors, we had to re-translate passages that Stoppard translates in the play. Several of the characters in the play, such as Housman and Oxford's Regius Professor of Greek Benjamin Jowett, are not just experts but leaders in their fields, and to convey that depth of knowledge the actors needed to have some facility with the Greek and Latin which they were citing. It was not enough for them simply to pronounce the words with a sense of the meaning of what they were saying. To assist the actors, we hired a classicist from the nearby University of Pennsylvania. He helped them understand metre and pronunciation and the general rules of these languages, often giving the actors more literal translations of their lines than the ones provided by Stoppard (who was, after all, trying to achieve a certain rhythm and poetry in his English translations that would enhance his play). As the actors realized that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between Latin and Greek phrases and their English equivalents, they wanted to know how to pronounce their lines accurately and how to act them emotionally. AEH, in particular, having repressed his homosexual feelings, finds his only real emotional outlet in the play through quoting Latin, as when he calls to the young Jackson, "ripae ulterioris amore!" (p. 5). Through working with the classicist, the actor playing AEH learned not just that this line means "with love of the further shore," but also how he could emphasize it, within the confines of pronunciation and metre, to its greatest emotional effect.

Another example of this re-translation comes at the end of the play when Housman speaks a passage of Greek from Theocritus:

Stoppard translates this line: "When thou art kind I spend the day like a god; when thy face is turned aside, it is very dark with me." While this rendering is truly lovely English, the actor playing Housman found it useful to think of the line as, "Whenever you are kind, to the blessed an equal I spend my day, but when you are not kind, [I am] thoroughly in darkness." Through this more literal but less poetic translation, he was better able to track the emotional shape of the line, and as a result one of the most heartbreaking moments of the entire play came as Housman's voice broke as he spoke this line of ancient Greek.

* * * *

The final act of translation needed to realize The Invention of Love is the same act of translation that every script needs: the translation from page to stage. Still, The Invention of Love here, as it seems to everywhere, poses its own set of challenges. For The Invention of Love, Stoppard provides fewer stage directions than he has for any of his earlier plays. At the same time, this play, being a dream, is decidedly non-linear, and action quickly shifts—from Oxford to the River Styx, from London to the French seashore. A visual reality is needed that can accommodate this fluidity, on the one hand, and can sustain a twenty-minute passionate exchange of ideas between AEH and Housman, on the other.

On the most fundamental level, this play is a dream. Yet the first line of the play, spoken by the dreaming AEH himself, is, "I'm dead, then. Good" (p. 1). It is difficult to establish a dream world when the play begins with a declaration that it is taking place in the after-world. Again and again, we used the resources of the theater to reinforce the sense of dream. When Walter Pater expounds on his idea that "success in life is to . . . burn always with this hard gem-like flame" (p. 19), we placed a young man in underwear playing a cello atop a green sculpture of a classical head, eighteen feet high. There is no literal way to process such an image. Instead, it is meant to evoke a more associative reality, taking an actor whom we have previously seen as the "Balliol bugger"—a student expelled from Oxford for writing suggestive sonnets to Pater—and having him create great beauty, while Pater extols such beauty.

Another dream image is the representation of the Oxford professors. Pater, Ruskin, Jowett, and Pattison all enter the stage with wings growing from their backs, playing croquet with oversized balls and tiny mallets. On the one hand, this is a purely theatrical image. On a checkerboard field of grass, the colorful croquet balls and winged players are just plain fun to look at; such visual variety is particularly timely here, as the professors are prone to spouting paragraph-length speeches that quote extensively from their theoretical writings. On the other hand, though, these visuals are a way of imagining the professors as seen through AEH; it is his dream, after all. Housman saw the professors as self-important and fundamentally ridiculous figures who regulated not just thought but morality. The slightly ridiculous stage image of our production helps to establish Housman's perspective on their pronouncements.

To realize the many scene shifts in The Invention of Love, we utilized a single, flexible set. It accommodated the two boats called for in the text; one was on tall stilts and moved across the back of the stage, and the other was suspended from the ceiling of the theater and flew over the audience. Scenes were evoked with small but specific details. The text indicates that Oscar Wilde is "in France, on the coast near Dieppe" (p. 91). The staging realized this through a picture of futile decadence, as he sat, near the end of his life, in an opulent chair near an enormous cake, as a string of red lights trickled down to the floor next to him. Throughout the play, staging was both flexible and evocative.

* * * *

Creating the East Coast premiere of The Invention of Love was a delicate and interesting process, one that resulted in the biggest critical and popular success in the Wilma Theater's history. In this process, we learned that a successful transition from written script to acted play was dependent on a variety of translations. Nothing can bring a play to life as effectively as actors who understand, believe, and live what they are saying. By Americanizing the script a bit, we brought the material closer both to the company creating the play and to the audience experiencing it. Close examination of the Greek and Latin and their functioning in the script enabled the actors to speak both languages—along with the challenging English of the play—skillfully; these actors were able to mine this intellectually rigorous play for a deeply moving emotional reality as well. The chemistry of a production team—director, designers, actors—led to a unified and focused interpretation of Tom Stoppard's play. The subtle changes which we made in the script were not to change or undermine The Invention of Love, but rather to support the script and present the play at its most immediate for Philadelphia audiences.

1. Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, (Grove Press, 1997), p. 37. All references are to this edition.

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