Sparkling Dullness
Our first play of 2025, at the Hampstead Theatre, is a revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play, The Invention of Love.
A. E. Housman’s life was neither packed with events, nor heroic.
An Oxford scholar who ploughed his finals through over-focus on a Latin poet not on that year’s syllabus, excited by the concept that textual analysis was akin to scientific discovery (which, in terms of research and analysis is a cogent thesis, but hardly exciting), a poet whose poetry now is a minor passion of a few (although there he did have his day), a contemporary of (and sympathiser with) Wilde and the aesthetes, who was a friend of none of them, a latterly successful scholar and teacher, overcoming (because he was a very good, if acerbic scholar) his early failures – the ‘facts’ of his life are in many ways very undramatic.
And yet, and yet…
The focus of his scholarship was on those Latin Poets (such as Catullus) who, through their poetry, effectively invented romantic love, even (and particularly) where that love crossed sexual boundaries (boundaries very much on a Victorian, but not a Classical, road map). And Housman lived in an era when crossing those boundaries, even admitting they existed, made life very difficult, at least for some.
This is a dense (and long) play – where almost nothing happens, which, were it not for Stoppard’s very clever script (too clever by half?) – successful characterisations of late 19th century Oxford figures (Pater, Jowett, Ruskin etc.) – and the excellent acting of Simon Russell Beale as the old (and dead – don’t ask) Housman and of Matthew Tennyson as his younger self would rather more than drag.
It’s still too long, (at 2 hours and 55 minutes including an interval) but, with the provisos above not intolerably so, and it’s still, absolutely, worth seeing.
And there is some very clever staging which engages the interest – but it is also Stoppard at his most precocious, demonstrating that only he could paint such a dry subject so engagingly.
It is almost as if he had risen to a dinner party challenge to make something ‘dramatic’ out of Housman’s life without drama.
Good reviews and the run has already been extended.