Theatre review: The Invention of Love

Crazy to think Tom Stoppard has spent an entire career writing plays about human beings, despite all the evidence suggesting he's never met one. In fact despite having enjoyed some of his work it may be time to add him to my very short list of creatives I've given enough chances to for one lifetime, as The Invention of Love is based around a premise that should be effortlessly moving, but ends up far too interested in deconstructing Catullus to get round to deconstructing emotions: Simon Russell Beale plays A E Housman, the Victorian poet and classicist who, by the time of his death, seems to have decided that the two pursuits don't really go together, as one requires rules, facts and logic to be set aside in favour of emotional truth, while the other involves picking apart every comma in the name of strict accuracy.

He feels that he should have dedicated his life to the latter, and having spent so much time in ancient Greek and Roman texts, when he dies he finds himself on the river Styx, being escorted by Charon (Alan Williams) to the Underworld of Hades.

But Elysium turns out to look a lot like Oxford at the time he was an undergraduate there, and he watches the younger Housman (Matthew Tennyson) make lifelong friends in Pollard (Seamus Dillane) and especially Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes,) with whom he ends up in unrequited love for the rest of his life. With an inkling of where his Oxford contemporary Oscar Wilde's (Dickie Beau) flamboyant public image might be leading him, he buries this side of his life under scholarship.

Among the various underlying themes of the play is the question of what kind of legacy a man leaves behind, and contrary to what Housman thinks it comes to the conclusion that it's the poetry that will, and should, endure. But the vast majority of the play buries itself in the same academia he does: I can buy Housman himself being so repressed he can't hear a snatch of Aeschylus without quoting the whole paragraph in the original Greek, and that being his main means of communication; but for everyone including the science student Jackson to have a permanent boner for Latin pronunciation feels like an archaic way of romanticising a bunch of young men whose spare time was probably more devoted to the same boners as any other 19-year-old*.

There's no doubt that a lot of Stoppard's dialogue is not just showing off his education but also very intricate and witty: I liked the double meaning of criticising Wilde's penchant for flipping a sentence around to turn it into a witticism - "if he's not careful he'll only be remembered for inversion." But the first half hour consists almost entirely of trading classical references, and as an audience it feels like you're just trying to weed out the ones you know the context for so you can unpick its cleverness. Rather than, say, having a chance to care about the characters.

The cast of Blanche McIntyre's production do their best to inject some of this human depth into their characters, but when I wasn't being distracted by the constantly disassembling and reassembling rowing boat that's the most memorable part of Morgan Large's design, I was wondering if the cast had been comparing notes on the times they've played the same roles: Did Jonnie Broadbent broach the subject of him playing a role in Humble Boy originally written for SSRB? Did SSRB ask Stephen Boxer for recipe suggestions for his upcoming Titus? Did Lloyd-Hughes and Michael Marcus compare thorn-related injuries from when they appeared on stage wearing only a bunch of roses? I think the woman next to me might also have had her mind elsewhere at times but it's hard to infer that accurately from her snores alone.

Stoppard regularly faces accusations of coldness, and The Invention of Love certainly backs up why that might be. It's ironic that the play eventually teaches Housman that the poetry was his true legacy, as when we finally get some of it quoted, the barely-coded (to modern ears at least) "Oh Who Is That Young Sinner," about Wilde's conviction, is easily the most affecting moment. But it comes after nearly three hours of the academic minutiae the poet buried his true feelings in instead.

The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard is booking until the 1st of February at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

*you might argue they're being viewed through Housman's filter but I don't buy that, or why would Charon bother showing him this outside view of his life?