'The Invention of Love' review — Tom Stoppard's exquisite portrait of unrequited passion cracks open the heart

Read our review of The Invention of Love, starring Simon Russell Beale as A. E. Housman, now in performances at the Hampstead Theatre to 1 February 2025.

It may seem odd in a Tom Stoppard play to find a leading character speak of a life defined by “long silences” – this from a writer, now 87, who revels in words as do few others. But that’s one of the many glories of this 1997 work that is now being served up afresh in a production from Blanche McIntyre surpassing, in both impact and import, its National Theatre premiere.

McIntyre’s deeply empathic staging hues closer to the play’s acclaimed Broadway rendering in 2001 that made a surprise New York success, two Tony awards included, out of so fully English a piece of writing. Abstruse as Stoppard’s hyper-erudite text can sometimes be, it is suffused at every turn with feeling. You watch in continual awe – and perhaps occasional confusion – as classical references get lobbed across the footlights, only to clock the deepening ache of this near-definitive portrait of unrequited love.

The emotional terrain confirms once again, as if we needed reminding, that this authorial brainiac can write bruisingly about the landscape beyond language, as is here shown by the bifurcated view on offer of the poet and classicist A. E. Housman (1859-1936).

We first see the author of A Shropshire Lad in the form of a puckish, drolly funny Simon Russell Beale, playing a newly dead Housman preparing to be ferried across the River Styx, Alan Williams in glistening form as a Charon worthy of an ancillary career as a stand-up comic. But the years soon rewind to find a blazing-eyed Matthew Tennyson picking up the same character whilst at Oxford immersing himself in “greats” and nursing a great crush on a friend and classmate, Moses Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes), who eventually wises up to feelings he cannot return.

Sexual repression and self-revelation provide the spine to a play that spins out in multiple directions as per the Stoppard norm: the younger AEH here calls to mind the comparably clever Thomasina in Arcadia, another prodigious intellect who pays a (rather different) price for her passions. The Invention of Love, written not long after Arcadia, similarly interweaves intellectual enquiry and emotional exuberance.

Revisiting a play she first directed as a student at Oxford, McIntyre wisely foregrounds its passion. The stage is extended into the house to ramp up all possible intimacy, whilst Lloyd-Hughes’s exemplary Jackson – a more beady-eyed figure than this bluff and hearty part can sometimes seem – is crucially positioned at one point in a side aisle amidst the audience.

The elevated realm of scholarship comes richly embedded in the writing, as do the notable thinkers – statesmen, scholars, publishers – for whom talk of the elegiac poet Propertius pales next to the bubbling up of a love that cannot speak its name. (In one especially rending scene, young Housman finds an unexpectedly likeminded classmate who is brought to knowing life by a brilliantly wry Michael Marcus.)

That motley crew of men (the play features a lone woman in Housman's sister, Katharine) encompasses the heady likes of, amongst others, Ruskin (Dominic Rowan) and Pater (Jonnie Broadbent), these intellects periodically glimpsed on the way to a second-act appearance from Housman’s Oxford contemporary Oscar Wilde. Stoppard pairs off these men of letters in a dynamic climax that pits Russell Beale’s indrawn Housman against the “chronological error” that is Dickie Beau’s superbly self-aware Wilde – a blazing figure unfortunate enough to have been born into the wrong time.

Love is the play’s lacerating thematic, whether evidenced in the youthful rapture of Tennyson’s astonishing young AEH or the Vanya-esque psychic abyss so deftly summoned by Russell Beale, whose singular career has long made an acting sensation of similar climes. The two men are tremendous, both singly and together.

At the performance attended, some in the audience took flight at the interval, done in presumably by the verbal dazzle. My advice is to look beyond the wordplay to something more wondrous – a play that feels, misleadingly, like homework yet comes possessed to those willing to open themselves to it of a lasting capacity to crack open the heart.

The Invention of Love is at the Hampstead Theatre to 1 February 2025.

Photo credit: The Invention of Love (Photos by Helen Murray)