Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, which premiered 27 years ago at the National Theatre, has two themes: the love of classical poetry and the love that dare not speak its name. Stoppard has said that the three-year research and rehearsal period was the happiest time of his professional life and the most enjoyable job he ever had.
The play, which will appeal most to classical students and scholars of corrupt texts, begins with the death of A.E. Housman in 1936. As Charon ferries him across the River Styx they pass three Victorian undergraduates in a boat on the River Isis. One of them is Housman’s younger self.
In his undergraduate days at Oxford, Housman fell in love with Moses Jackson, a hearty athlete and scientist, who never guessed Housman was “sweet” on him. ‘I would have died for you,’ he says, ‘but I never had the luck.’ His love remains unrequited.
Hausman devoted his life to poetry and classical scholarship, believing that the recovery of ancient texts was the highest task of all, the crown and summit of scholarship. He became the foremost classicist of his generation. Today, he is best known as the author of A Shropshire Lad.
The play, erudite, fragmentary, obscure, is challenging to director and cast; and even more so to audiences, who have not done any homework. Over-researched, there is too much material, too much detail, to grasp at one sitting.
Jowett, Pater, Ruskin and Pattison play croquet. Labouchere, Stead, Harris, Postgate play billiards. Hausman and Oscar Wilde have a chat. (They never met in real life). Wilde declares lies can be truthful and invention can be truer to life.
Simon Russell Beale is the old Hausman. Matthew Tennyson is the young Hausman. Ben Lloyd Hughes is Moses Jackson. Dickie Beau is Oscar Wilde.
The play is imaginatively directed by Blanche McIntyre, who directed a student production of The Invention of Love when she was an undergraduate at Oxford. The staging of three men rowing in a boat is cleverly managed.
It’s time to revive Stoppard’s masterpiece, Arcadia, which has not been seen in the West End for 14 years.
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