The Invention of Love
Fresh off the back of his peerless Arcadia and pretty much the pre-eminent playwright of his day, in 1997 Tom Stoppard could have scored a hit if he’d released the phone directory as his new play, provided he’d added a few Stoppardian quips.
And in some ways that’s kind of what he did. There is much to admire about the three-hour The Invention of Love, and I’m glad I got a chance to see it in Blanche McIntrye’s sturdy Hampstead Theatre revival. I don’t think the word ‘boring’ is fair. But it’s certainly dense. As Stoppard himself says in the programme’s accompanying interview: ‘you wouldn’t write it now, and [if you did] nobody would put it on… how many people now would share a sharp appetite for Latin scholarship..?’.
Concerned with the life of Victorian classicist and poet AE Housman, its focus is his Oxford days. Here we see the younger version of the man (Matthew Tennyson) revelling in academia and his own burgeoning brilliance while struggling personally with his feelings for BFF Moses Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) and the broader paradox that the Victorian society that so revered the Greeks of old was also hostile of the homosexuality – not yet a word – that the Greeks celebrated (though quite how hostile the Victorians really were is an intriguing question that – like many things in this play – Stoppard explores at some length).
There is a lot of dizzying cleverness here, but there is also a lot about conjugation (like, a lot), and heaps of digressive scenes about...
