“Vintage Stoppard in its
intelligence and wit.” —Variety
It is
1936, and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead
at last—yet his memories are dramatically alive. Confronting his younger self
from the vantage of death, Housman thinks back to the man he loved, who could
not return his feelings, and considers the Oxford of his youth, suffused with
the flamboyant influence of the Wildean Aesthetic movement and the restrictions
of High Victorian morality. Winner of the Evening Standard’s Best Play
Award, The Invention of Love inhabits Housman’s imagination as if a
dream, illuminating both the pain of hopeless love and the passion displaced
into poetry.