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THEATRE: The Popular Mechanicals: Arts Theatre, London

The Invention of Love

He, famously, had nothing to declare except his genius. And, to judge by the new crop of plays and films, neither have we. But exactly which Oscar are we going Wilde about: the flamboyant bisexual or the subversive aesthete?

Tom Stoppard and AE Housman make an unlikely combination. Housman was a late starter who didn't achieve recognition until his sixties; Stoppard produced his first international hit at 29. And while Stoppard's plays juggle a dizzying array of intellectual and artistic ideas - from Bauhaus to quantum physics - Housman is best known for a naive pastoral poetry that pines for a land of lost content, blue-remembered hills and cuckoos.

Although he abandoned his brief acting career years ago - "I didn't travel far, but at least I learnt from the journey" - last year Richard Eyre had an uncredited cameo role in a National Theatre production. Nobody saw him. In fact, his appearance was entirely fictional. He was conjured up as a character in Violin Time, a deliriously ludicrous comic monologue by Ken Campbell, Britain's comic maestro of theatrical anarchy. Campbell spun a yarn in which Eyre warned him of a dire predicament: "You are the victim of Famation of Character... They've got you on the hamster/ gerbil treadwheel now. It means your next show has got to be better than they said your last one was." Campbell is still spinning, but two weeks from today Eyre will open his production of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, his National Theatre swansong, before stepping quietly off the wheel of success.

Actors are supposed to wish each other "Break a leg"; you suspect that Mark Bazeley has heard rather too many jokes on that score just lately, so we'll just take it as read. The reason I mention this is that, as we were informed on the way into the Donmar for the press night of The Seagull last Thursday, Bazeley had injured his leg and would therefore be playing Konstantin, the romantic young writer, with the aid of a crutch: this was not, we were assured, meant to be taken as part of the interpretation. As it turned out, the crutch suited the part rather well, heightening the sense that Konstantin, with his high artistic ideals and his fits of self-loathing and despair, is an outsider; and in Bazeley's fine performance, the intensity of his inner anger seemed to be magnified by the scuttling, awkward gait he was forced to adopt from time to time.

In Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, the audience is confronted with a group of actors apparently speaking English - you see them building a stage, shouting "Plank", "Slab" and "Block" to one another, and it seems obvious that these are just ordinary words to describe the objects they are using. But it turns out that they are speaking an entirely new and foreign language that happens to be composed of English words. In this language "Plank" actually means "Ready", "Slab" means "OK" and "Block" means "Next". Some meanings are inverted entirely: a schoolboy's respectful "Good day, sir" comes out as "Useless git."

As his parting shot as director of the National Theatre, Richard Eyre has taken the alienating Olivier auditorium and transformed it into a theatre in the round. Nobody would have approved more than Bertolt Brecht.

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