SACRED MONSTERS IN THE UNDERWORLD
Deep darkness within the U-shaped seating,: into it on wheels glides the dark gondola: Charon the ferryman, after millennia punting to and fro across the Styx, is resigned to hearing jokes like “dead on time” from the clever-dicks he picks up. He’s just collected A.E.Housman, poet and professor of Classics: Simon Russell Beale . But this play being by Tom Stoppard, Housman finds that Hades is the Oxford of his youth: deans, aesthetes, mavericks, earnest undergraduates athletic or studious, Victorian grandee academics like Jowett of Balliol and hearty old Ruskin , who made his students break roadstone for the sake of their souls.
Old Housman finds them in Hades and in memory, bickering over points of classical scholarship, playing croquet with invisible balls and beautifully timed “cloks” (sound and movement are immaculate in Blanche McIntyre’s production). The younger ones row around on wonderfully convincing wheeled boats, getting to know each other. One of them is the poet’s younger self: pale, shy ,enthused about classics (they all quote Latin and Greek at one another) . His joy is finding inspiration in the heroic loves of antiquity, where male friends adventure, fight and die together in chaste but passionate fealty. His best friend is Moses Jackson, studying science and running races, sometimes in dreams overhead running towards us white in shorts and singlet . But the love young Housman yearns for is impossible, illegal: “beastliness” as Jowett thunders, sacking another student. Tricky balance for those dons: one moment set on giving intelligent lads a classical education (“if you can’t write Latin and Greek verse, how can you hope to be of use in the world?”) , the next having to throw them out for such Greek “boy-love”.
The early scenes with the academics are priceless, Stephen Boxer’s Jowett a star turn in itself, Latin tags and textual arguments flying (let’s admit it) over many heads but stimulatingly : vintage Stoppard but staying just this side of annoying. Roaming in Hades through his memories Russell Beale is as usual extraordinary: able to turn in half a word, a twitch of the brow, from pedantry to pain and back again through comedy. His Housman is impassioned, dry, tender , cynical of his own worth, exasperatingly lovable. But alongside him – literally for one riveting ten-minute scene merely talking side by side on a bench – is his younger self.: young Housman played by Matthew Tennyson absolutely shines. He stands alongside masters like Beale and Boxer, playing younger than his years , rose-white boyhood wanting “the good and the beautiful”, the Greek and Roman idea of Virtue. He leaves Oxford early and shares rooms with his adored Jackson as junior civil servants at the Patent Office, only late and finally admitting – to the straight, astonished Jackson in a flare of fatal passion – the love that dare not speak its name.
Not that it had a name till later , when Lord Alfred Douglas coined “homosexual”. (Housman of course pedantically horrified at the barbarity of blending Latin and Greek) . But Tennyson’s performance takes the emotional centre of the play, sets fire to its complex anecdotal wordiness. He stands perfectly alongside Russell Beale , older self and younger, a poet in painful development. The “Shropshire Lad” series about the shine and early death of youth comes of this period of hopeless and serious love, and watching them old and young you believe it. Though , as one contemporary casually observes , that he “never read such a man for telling you you’re better off dead”
Stoppard has wicked, insider-scholar fun with the fact that the period, from mid-Victorian down to 1936, saw an exotic zoo of personalities who ran into one another or one another’s reputations – generally at Oxford . There are wonderful lines drily delivered: like Housman’s about the contrast between Walter Pater’s emotional intinctive aesthetics and Ruskin who “stares hard” at art’s beauties and has them stare back hard at him, exhaustingly. Donnish quips abound (“when he died it was the first time he ever finished anything he’d started”). In the second half, on a picnic blanket in London young Housman watches Ben Lloyd-Hughes’ solid athletic Jackson win a race, and their other friend Chamberlain (Michael Marcus) sees how love lies and how it will go nowhere.
Cameo moments demonstrate the changing times. Boxer reappears as the MP Labouchere, irritated with Dominic Rowan’s campaigning journalist Stead who exposed child prostitution, but himself amending an Act making homosexual acts even more stringently punishable than before. Rowan also reappears as Jerome K Jerome, a tiny contemptuous player in the downfall of Oscar Wilde. Wilde himself (Dickie Beau) has a vital late moment in Hades, lounging in velvet and reproaching dead Housman for not grasping at love , freedom and life . He reminisces about his own beloved Bosie: “spoilt, vindictive and utterly selfish , but those are only the facts..He is Hyacinth, ivory and gold..joy” . We all, he says, invent the object of our love. Yet his scorn at Housman melts, because A Shropshire Lad justifies its writer. Beautiful.
hampsteadtheatre.com. to 1 Feb.
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