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“Vintage Stoppard in its intelligence and wit.” —VarietyIt 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.
About the author
Tom Stoppard is the author of such seminal works as
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
Jumpers,
The Real Thing,
Arcadia,
The Invention of Love,
Travesties, and the trilogy
The Coast of Utopia. His screen credits include
Parade’s End,
Shakespeare in Love,
Enigma,
Empire of the Sun, and
Anna Karenina.
Summary
It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman’s youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student named Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the elder Housman confronts the younger version of himself and his memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson –– the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings.
