“The Invention of Love”, Hampstead Theatre
Jeremy Malies in north London
24 December 2024
“I had that Dionysus in the back of the boat!” is one of many gags in Tom Stoppard’s investigation of the life of poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman in The Invention of Love. Even a ferryman across the Styx, it seems, will boast about previous passengers and Charon (played by a suitably ethereal Alan Williams) is proud to list the luminaries he has taken to the Underworld.
Dickie Beau and Simon Russell Beale.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
I thought about my own mortality. Better have a coin about you for this journey or you’ll spend 100 years in additional limbo on the riverbank. Pretend you haven’t noticed Cerberus and he’ll leave you alone was another possibly valuable lesson. As Housman, Simon Russell Beale produces a coin from 1936 and, when quizzed, gives Charon a synopsis of his career.
Housman arrived at Oxford in 1877 tipped as a high-flyer but ended up with a pass degree as a result of lovesickness and reading outside the syllabus. The best classicist of his generation, he was later a professor at Cambridge and wrote the verse collection A Shropshire Lad. Despite or perhaps because of repeated mentions of dying young, the poems are popular with troops in combat and there are numerous musical settings. My exposition here feels clunky; Stoppard’s stagecraft gets most of this across smoothly in one conversation with Charon.
It’s a memory play with a fluid structure in which characters dating back to the sixth century BCE and forward to the late Victorian era move around in boats or follow a croquet ball. We see two versions of Housman. Beale plays him as a nursing home inmate and ghost while his younger self (aged 18 to 26) is played by Matthew Tennyson.
Beale has the rare ability to turn the collective mood of a theatre on a dime. He achieves moments of confessional intimacy (even though Stoppard makes it clear that Housman was a cold fish) when advancing to the apron of the stage.
Stoppard is gently derisory of theatre critics as usual and there are put-downs for us in a scene set at the Savoy Theatre. Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience about the aesthetic movement is Stoppard’s opportunity to introduce Oscar Wilde played by Dickie Beau. Housman and Wilde overlapped for a year at Oxford but never met for real. Here Wilde movingly recalls Housman’s poems being recited to him by visitors at Reading Gaol. This is historical fact.
Simon Russell Beale.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
Sir Tom allows himself one trademark joke involving Wildean inversion but is never lazy in the witticisms he creates for Oscar, just as Beau is inventive with tone and gesture and does not resort to caricature. One of the last moments of the play is Charon ferrying Wilde about in the Stygian gloom which is conjured up with gauzy filters by Peter Mumford who also designed the lighting for the premiere at the National Theatre in 1997.
Any reservations? Stoppard’s treatment of a trio of late-Victorian journalists including social commentator W. T. Stead barely gels with the main plot. It could have been trimmed by director Blanche McIntyre with permission from the author who was much in evidence on press night a few rows in front of me. Elsewhere, McIntyre handles the converging and expanding time schemes superbly; I almost blubbed as the elder Housman, recognising that the younger Housman is on a roll in his analysis of a classical text, tells an unseen nurse to let the youth continue. With a double first in Classics from Oxford, McIntyre (who I’m sure had to be on her toes throughout) was at least in familiar territory and it shows in a sense of unquestionable authenticity.
Housman’s life was predicated on unrequited love for Oxford contemporary Moses Jackson who was fond of him but heterosexual and unable to love Housman physically. “I would have died for you but I never had the luck!” is one of the most poignant lines as Beale on the Styx reaches out to touch Jackson (played by Ben Lloyd-Hughes) who is rowing on the Cherwell.
The Oxford boating scenes featuring spiffing Varsity blazers are pure Jerome K. Jerome and he is a character (played by Dominic Rowan.) Homosexuality is described as “beastliness” when recalled from school days and being “spooney” when one is a little older. Confronted with the new phrase “homosexual”, Housman is dismissive saying that it is half Latin and half Greek! I gained much life advice from this play, including an undergraduate saying, “Girls who kiss don’t know Latin.”
Two rivers (and even a tributary on an upper tier for Wilde and Charon) render things very fluvial and the set by Morgan Large makes it clear that much of this is a shadowy underworld. Charon is outraged by the Cherwell trio. “Brought their own boat, whatever next?” There is another realm in which senior academics from Housman’s time at Oxford play croquet. Chief among these is Benjamin Jowett (Stephen Boxer), master of Balliol, who is the subject of one of the most scathing of the jokes when Stoppard has him say that the expansion of the British Empire pleases him because people hitherto unacquainted with his translation of Plato will now be able to enjoy it!
Similarities? There is intricate discussion of textual readings, and I thought of The Browning Version and its treatment of Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon. And speaking of Aeschylus, there is a dizzying moment when Housman (it’s charming that this is among his first thoughts in the afterlife) thinks that Charon may know lines from the lost Achilleis (trilogy). Charon recites something but Housman is deflated when he realizes that it is one of the fragments that has come down to us.
Only Tom Stoppard could write a play whose main theme (for me at least) is the tension between being a poet or a textual scholar. But if you consider that The Hard Problem centred on whether Darwinism is consistent with altruism, one should not be surprised. This is a traditional but timeless play that eschews modernity, perhaps taking its cue from John Ruskin (also played by Rowan) who tells us, “Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.”
