Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In an interview at the time of the first production of The Invention of Love in 1997, Tom Stoppard said he’d spent so long researching its hero AE Housman that he could have written a PhD about him. But academe’s loss turned out to be theatre’s gain, Stoppard’s darkly humorous meditation on love, homosexuality, aesthetics, knowledge, virtue, heroism, death, you name it, garnering awards when it opened.Now back on the London stage 27 years on, does it still pack a punch? As protagonists go, Housman isn’t the easiest sell. As one of the characters in the play says of his 1896 poetry collection A Shropshire Lad, “I think he stayed with the wrong people in Shropshire. I never read such a book for telling you you’re better off dead.” But Stoppard is the master of mining gold where you thought there was only dross and weaving connections where you thought there were none. It does the production no harm, too, that director Blanche McIntyre has Simon Russell Beale as the poet. From the moment he shuffles out in the Stygian gloom and says, quite matter-of-factly, “I’m dead, then. Good,” he has the room at his mercy. What first drew Stoppard to write about Housman was his discovery that as well as being a poet he was one of the great classical scholars of the late 19th and early 20th century. The play has its fair share of discussions about the minutiae of misplaced commas in ancient manuscripts, but Stoppard pulls off his trademark trick of expanding from the micro- to the macrocosmic, so a discussion of textural criticism becomes an exploration of “what is the good and the beautiful really and truly?”The story catches emotional fire when Housman wanders in mind to the 1870s Oxford of his youth, where he fell in unrequited love with fellow student Moses Jackson (played as a rather brilliantly gormless sports jock by Ben Lloyd-Hughes). As the young Housman, Matthew Tennyson captures his creeping horror as he realises what his love means and how he must hide it.In a play where quite a lot of talking heads (John Ruskin, Walter Pater, among others) wander on and slap down their philosophies, Stoppard stops proceedings from getting dry by throwing in a strong dose of bubble-puncturing humour mixed with Wildean paradox. And indeed the ghost of Wilde stalks the whole play, until he appears (played by Dickie Beau) for a final showdown with Housman: “Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light,” he shouts. And yet, somehow, Stoppard, Russell Beale and Tennyson find a light in Housman you might never have imagined.★★★★☆To February 1, hampsteadtheatre.com
