The Invention of Love

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard's new play is centered around A.E.Housman, poet and Classics scholar, whose most famous poem was A Shropshire Lad. This new play premiered at the Royal National Theatre in 1997, directed by Richard Eyre.

It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories, however, are dramatically if confusedly alive. The river which flows through Tom Stoppard's play connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's early manhood where High Victorianism in art, literature and morality is being challenged by the Aesthetic movement and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst on to the London scene...The Invention of Love premiered at the National Theatre, London, in September 1997.