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.

Theatre review: Kiss Me

He's still considered something of a big-hitter after the success of One Man, Two Guvnors, but Richard Bean's more recent plays have tended towards the disappointing, so a step back to something a bit more low-key and intimate could be a good move. And so it proves as Kiss Me is a two-hander running just over an hour, and premieres at Hampstead's Downstairs studio space. A romantic comedy-drama with a period setting but some unexpectedly modern attitudes, it takes place a few years after the First World War, which has left women all over Britain widowed, or with husbands so badly injured they can't father children. Enter the unseen and mysterious Dr Trollope, who finds desperate women and offers them an extreme solution: With fertility treatment still in its infancy, she can arrange for a visit from a particularly potent young man to make a baby the old-fashioned way.

Re-review: Jumpy

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The second press night for Jumpy is next week.

Almost all of the original Royal Court cast of Jumpy from last year have returned for this, the second transfer to take up residence at the Duke of York's Theatre. Still, Nina Raine's production may take a couple of days to settle into its new home, and seemed to me to be starting a bit sluggishly tonight. I'm sure it'll have found its feet again by the end of the week and in any case once it hit its stride April De Angelis' occasionally dark comedy of a mother and daughter sparks into the entertaining show I remembered enjoying so much the first time. Hilary (Tamsin Greig) is 50 and feeling as if she's about to lose everything. Her job's in danger, her marriage to Mark (Ewan Stewart) is stagnant and, in the play's central relationship, her teenage daughter Tilly (Bel Powley) seems to hate her guts.