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 Oxford masters and Victorian MPs, scheming away. Why digressive? Well because we’re notionally in the afterlife – or possibly a deathbed hallucination – in which the elder Housman (the redoubtable Simon Russell Beale) trades droll banter with Alan Williams’s dour Stygian ferryman Charon. Tossing in scenes of John Ruskin et al gossiping about the students when Housman never witnessed this happening just feels a tad extra when you’re pushing the three hour mark. There is the sense that the underworld stuff is just flashy window dressing, although it’s certainly not unwelcome. Beale is typically wonderful, not least in his big, rueful setpiece dialogue with the younger version of himself. But it’s a fairly light role for an actor of his stature; his co-star Tennyson is solid as the younger Housman, but he’s just not in Beale’s league. Meanwhile McIntyre’s production is elegant but fairly barebones – beyond the device of Charon it feels starved of a certain amount of razzle dazzle.
Housman is a fascinating figure and what Stoppard is trying to say about love, language, queerness and our relationship with our own pasts and the classical past is intriguing. The lingering background presence of Oscar Wilde is smartly done: a sort of uninhibited negative to the buttoned up Housman, he is gossiped about constantly but only appears late on, in a haunting turn from avant-cabaret performer Dickie Beau.
It’s worth watching, but it’s somewhat sloggy, and I wonder if for once a more conventional playwright might have articulated this all in a more gripping, incisive fashion. But then it’s unlikely anyone else would have possibly thought of writing this. Ultimately, there is no Tom Stoppard play or Simon Russell Beale performance unworthy of your time.
