Intellectual Hell

Hampstead theatre

In Tom Stoppard’s revived 1997 play, the poet and classicist A E Housman finds himself dead in Hades, meets his younger self and explores his memories. Simon Russell Beale as the older Houseman garnered great praise, but some of the critics found the play too clever by half.

Matt Wolf popping up at LondonTheatre (5★) noted, ‘Abstruse as Stoppard’s hyper-erudite text can sometimes be, it is suffused at every turn with feeling. You watch in continual awe – and perhaps occasional confusion – as classical references get lobbed across the footlights, only to clock the deepening ache of this near-definitive portrait of unrequited love.’

Tim Bano in The Independent (4★) said, ‘Blanche McIntyre’s subtle, uncluttered production…delivers a pretty good case for the play being …a bona fide masterpiece.’

The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish (4) was also impressed: ‘There’s more to chew on in two or so hours than at the amplest festive feast.’ He said Simon Russell Beale ‘makes every line resonate with fresh thought and feeling’.

David Jays in The Guardian (3★) said, ‘The quicksilver Russell Beale is a vocal glory, leaping in a breath from flute to poignant bassoon, from wit to sorrow.’

Alexander Cohen at BroadwayWorld (3★) also liked SRB but was unsure about the play: ‘this is Stoppard at 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.’

Chris Omaweng for LondonTheatre1 (3★) wrote, ‘A demanding and yet not completely inaccessible show, it is at least consistent in its intense analysis of ancient works as well as the world inhabited by Housman and his contemporaries.’

Dominic Maxwell of The Times (3★) said ‘it offers plenty of pleasures, not least a characteristically lucid and tender central turn from Simon Russell Beale. It’s wise, witty, dense, dazzling, opaque. And sometimes it’s a slog.’ To put it another way, ‘this is a play with great monents, not a great play ‘

The i-paper‘s Fiona Mountford (2★) found it ‘unbearable’. About Stoppard, she said, ‘too often his lofty intellect cowers audience members into submission’. But not Ms Mountford with her ‘Oxbridge classics degree’. She explained, ‘we have three hours of often indistinguishable men exchanging achingly arch lines about the minutiae of classical grammar and quoting screeds and screeds of Latin at each other.’ To put it more plainly: ‘it feels less like drama and more like intellectual masturbation’. Est quod est! as Fiona might say.

Critics’ Average Rating 3.4★

The Invention of Love continues at Hampstead Theatre until 1 February 2025. Buy tickets directly from the theatre. 

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