I am a fake, a fraud, a philistine.Am I really this stupid? A swine before pearls?
I don't want to read extended monologues on Latin and Greek translation. I am sick to death of Oxford and Cambridge and English Public School ... hell, I'm sick of the English upper class of the 19th century in general. Why won't these people shut up, or at least say something real. I can't penetrate this world.
That's what I thought struggling through the first act of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love
. Stoppard has a reputation for writing plays of ideas that leave the average audience behind. It's one of the few criticisms that has stuck to one of our acknowledged Greatest Living Playwrights. I've never agreed: to me his plays have always been brilliantly crafted works that use those twenty dollar words to get an basic human truths. Reading this play, I suddenly felt like I understood what people were complaining about.It may be simply that I feel more at home with the math and science that mark Arcadia
, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
, and the underappreciated Hapgood
. I'm familiar enough with the ideas there that I can quickly see through them to the themes underneath. But here I'm in a land of poetry and classicists and the Aesthetic movement, swimming in deep pools of Latin and Greek grammar.Maybe it just doesn't read well. I can sense the subtext underneath, and the second act brings it to the fore in some achingly beautiful passages that strip away the rococo ornamentation of the first ... but I just can't grapple with it. I imagine a well-researched cast that understood the detail in those dense speeches would bring some life and beauty to the text, but I simply can't spend the time researching every reference. It's a truly alien world.
Next Week: Riding The Bull by August Schulenburg
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2 comments:
I think "well-researched" may be selling it a little short. The cast would have to spend a solid year conducting enough research to truly understand everything they say. It can't be solved by your run-of-the-mill dramaturgical "packet".
I finished the play . . . could someone explain it to me please?
I don't usually have such a difficult time with Stoppard, but this read included an imaginary playwright standing across from me, shaking his head and sighing (a lot).
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