ajhlovestheatre

THE INVENTION OF LOVE

by Tom Stoppard

directed by Blanche McIntyre

Hampstead Theatre, London – until 1 February 2024

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2024/the-invention-of-love/

When theatregoers refer to Stoppard as intimidatingly clever, it’s plays like this 1997 meditation on poetry, classicism and the regrets of a life not fully lived that helped cement that reputation. Really though, The Invention of Love is about, well, love; love in its purest form. It’s dressed up with Stoppard’s customary verbal dexterity and mind-bogglingly detailed background research and knowledge, but it’s hard to miss the beating, broken heart at its core.

Simon Russell Beale plays scholar and poet A E Housman, first seen after his death in 1936, being ferried across the River Styx into the afterlife (“I’m dead, then. Good. And this is the Stygian gloom one has heard so much about”) by a wry Charon (Alan Williams, very funny). Instead of eternity though, Housman is transported back to a vision of his younger self (a wonderfully gauche and earnest Matthew Tennyson) and his contemporaries at Oxford University in the mid nineteenth century. While the academics debate the High Victorianism in literature, art and morality versus the Aesthetic movement, prizing beauty over function and spearheaded by Dickie Beau’s flamboyant, whip-smart Oscar Wilde, youthful Housman is equally preoccupied with his covert, unrequited love for an athletic fellow student.

Stoppard’s cerebral script is peppered with aphorisms, literary quotes and Latin, and Blanche McIntyre’s chilly staging zips it along at as spritely a pace as possible but ultimately can’t, or possibly isn’t interested in, disguising the fact that this is a pretty static piece, characterised mostly by men talking. That’s not the only way in which it feels defiantly unfashionable: for starters, there’s the length (three hours including interval); then the fact that, for all the youth of many of the principal figures and the forbidden carnal urges represented, the play remains determinedly unsexy.

It is however a feast of fine acting. Tennyson breaks down most affectingly when confessing his love for Ben Lloyd-Hughes’s bewildered, likeable, sporty Jackson. A superb trio of actors – Jonnie Broadbent, Stephen Boxer and Dominic Rowan –  brilliantly differentiate between a series of wittily pontificating literary and academic figures. Dickie Beau’s Oscar Wilde is a brittle, volatile creation (“better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light”), supremely stylish but with a hint of real anguish, and his scene with a rueful Housman, bringing the contrasts between their very different approaches to their (at the time) illegal sexuality, into sharp, unforgiving relief, is the most engrossing and moving in the play.

Few, if any, actors are as adept as Simon Russell Beale at conveying roiling feeling under a facade of unimpeachable urbanity and ferocious intelligence, tempered with irresistible sweetness and humour. He’s in his element here, as a sympathetic, all too human Housman. As with his triumphant, Tony-nominated turn in the same author’s Jumpers as the emotionally stunted philosopher whose marriage is imploding, he gives us a fully realised intellectual who we can see and feel thinking….and suffering. It’s a beautiful performance.

McIntyre’s production falls between the impressionistic and the overly literal: men play billiards in a rectangular slice of light, small set pieces fuse together to make boats drifting down the Cherwell (or is it the Thames…or the Styx?!), party streamers and a half populated tea table descend for the Oscar Wilde section, benches on green banks judder clumsily into view. I think the idea is that these are fragments of memory in the minds eye, but the lack of flow and enchantment in McIntyre’s staging and Morgan Large’s generally uninspired design (dimly lit by Peter Mumford) means that it sometimes feels frustratingly unfocused. Richard Eyre’s original National Theatre production had a painterly quality, and a degree of that aesthetic pleasure wouldn’t go amiss here.

This is very much a night ‘on’, and it clearly won’t be for everybody but watching actors of the calibre of Beale and his cast mates is always a pleasure. Stoppard’s writing has an elegant ferocity, butn the theatricality that adds an irresistible tang  to much of the rest of his esteemed canon is mostly missing here. The emotional undertow is there though…you just have to work to get at it.