A longish evening (three hours if you include the interval) of donnish talk about classical poetry and male-on-male love won’t be everyone’s taste, but, though it does occasionally go on a bit, if you give it your attention, Blanche McIntyre’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play is rewarding. It opens as poet and scholar A E Housman, best known for his A Shropshire Lad cycle of poems, stands on the banks of the Styx waiting to be collected by ferryman Charon.
Even before Alan Williams’s Charon has rowed Simon Russell Beale’s Housman across to Hades, fellow students from his first days at Oxford appear on the river, his close friends Pollard (Seamus Dillane) and Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes), along with his young self (Matthew Tennyson), each in a section of boat before they get linked up together like Housman’s memories of them.
What follows is a play that is virtually plotless but intriguingly ponders the problems of classical scholarship. How many copyist errors, typesetter mistakes and editorial amendments have crept in over the millennia since between these often fragments of text being written and the versions we now have? Even without them, how do you translate, what is the poet’s real meaning and what do you do when their texts are about male-on-male love that your modern mores find unacceptable?
What do you do if you fall in love with someone of your own sex, as Housman does with fellow student, straight sportsman Jackson? That lifelong love, unrequited, is the other main theme here. There is a touching scene, where Houseman is picnicking with friend Chamberlain (Michael Marcus) to watch Jackson race, that shows how hopeless it is. When in later life Housman declares his feelings to Jackson, his reaction is total astonishment.
Housman’s demeanor is vividly contrasted with that of Oxford contemporary Oscar Wilde (a flamboyant Dickie Beau), while Stephen Boxer’s Jowett rages against what we now call homosexuality. Boxer also doubles as Labouchère, the man whose amendment to an Act of Parliament sent Wilde to gaol. In their discussion, the dons quote Sophocles’ definition of love as “a piece of ice held tight in the fist”.
Russell Beale has an uncanny ability to express feelings under the surface, while Tennyson as his younger self captures enthusiasm and freshness. There’s a peak scene where they meet and talk about classical poetry. Both capture his humanity.
Blanche McIntyre’s production is simply staged on a thrust stage with a few dreamlike images overhead and a fine cast who bring these dead men to vivid life. While Stoppard sometimes plays verbal games, these academics play croquet and billiards, beautifully mimed with no balls and indeed no table with sound effects beautifully synchronised. Perhaps that is how things are in Hades.
Reviewer: Howard Loxton