Review: THE INVENTION OF LOVE, Hampstead Theatre

Don’t be fooled. It’s midwinter and a rotund man with a big white beard is centre stage. But this is no schmultz-fest panto. It’s Simon Russell Beale as A.E Housman in Blanche McIntyre’s sober new production of Tom Stoppard’s portrait of the artist as an old man, The Invention Of Love.

Penned in 1997, this is Stoppard at his most dazzling and his most frustrating: lapping tides of stuffy self-referentiality, self-congratulatory smirks, and pats on the back for every reference you can count pull you under the waves. Hampstead Theatre surely is the final outcrop of the North London intelligencia, most of whom have either been priced out to the countryside or have died. But Stoppard’s aching examination of the intolerable opaqueness of love is a buoy to cling onto saving us from drowning beneath the torrent of ideas.

Housman’s polyphonic identity is skilfully peeled layer by layer, each new skin a different shade from the last. Classicist. Scholar. Lover. And poet – the bedrock beneath them all. Beale is the old Housman reminiscing, possibly whilst dreaming he is ferrying into the underworld, possibly already dead. Fragments of his younger life are played out for him to examine, his “love that dare not speak its name” for friend Moses Jackson waltzing alongside his love of Classics. Greek poets are a soul nourishing antidote to Victorian sexual repression.

Oscar Wilde makes a cameo towards the end, a theatrical (in all senses of the word) bow to tie it all up and a parallel poet-cum-foil to draw out Housman’s comparative reticence. That’s exactly the problem. So many squiggly hypotheses are intertwined that it feels frustratingly impossible to string them all together enough for the play to garner momentum. Can I be fascinated and slightly bored at the same time? Apparently so. But that duality is coiled in the heart of the writing, Housman’s inner life as a wistful poet versus his public persona as an often-fiery classics scholar. Perhaps true disentanglement is too Sisyphean a task and that’s the point.

But thankfully there is Beale. The cavalcade of intertwining characters and concepts orbits Simon Russell Beale’s sun like gravity. Scenes without him loose that warmth fast. A young Hausman, played by Matthew Tennyson, struggles to conjure the same snug (or smug) composure, eyebrows perennially arched in a cold melancholic stencil. Cosiness emanates from each of Beale’s syllables, even if they are moulded into vinegary insults and weary cynicism towards a world that would not let him live as himself.

Without him the claustrophobic elegance of Blanche McIntyre’s austere but controlled production, scrunched into Hampstead Theatre with minimal props bar an impressively disassembling boat, would crumble. Scenes drift in and out with a dreamlike serenity. Come to watch Beale shatter Houseman’s heart, and slowly glue it back together.

The Invention of Love plays until 1 February

Photo Credits: Helen Murray

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