How Much Did I Love The Invention of Love?

When Tom Stoppard died last year, my heart ached in all the ways a heart does when a great light — and one that has helped to illuminate your own particular path — goes out. The only consolation was that perhaps, despite the playwright’s unlikeness with so many of the voices that feel most enmeshed with our Zeitgeist, we’d get a new crop of Stoppard productions, a season of memorials with the potential to prove themselves as vigorous as ever.

No such luck. As 2026 has rolled along, I’ve seen Arcadia pop up in regional theater programming a touch more often than usual, but the flood I dreamed of (maniacally, foolishly, like a Stoppard character: And the streets shall flow with Hapgood and On the Razzle! Jumpers will open on Broadway, and Sonia Friedman will produce Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth!!) has not come to pass.

Unless it’s just beginning? At Theaterlab, a small third-floor white box on West 36th Street, David Greenspan is currently doing one of the many things he does with seemingly inexhaustible energy and total aplomb: dedicating his chops and Off Broadway clout to the work of a young director and ensemble, this time as the catalyst for an intimate and lovely revival of Stoppard’s underproduced jewel The Invention of Love. The sad truth is that you’re not going to get many chances to see this play: It’s two hours and 45 minutes in the afterlife of A. E. Housman — poet of A Shropshire Lad and preeminent classics scholar of post-Victorian England — as he floats down the River Styx with Charon the boatman (here played with Cockney affability by Annabel Capper), remembering his college days at Oxford, seeing the shades of his younger self and the boy he loved, bickering about Latin meter and bantering with Oscar Wilde.

If this sounds like heaven to you, let’s get coffee sometime. If it sounds esoteric or otherwise off-putting, well, that’s certainly what the boards of most American theaters seem to think — and so thank goodness for companies like the MAP and directors like Zachary Elkind, who know otherwise. Stoppard himself had a soft spot for The Invention of Love. It was his favorite of his plays, and its not-so-secret secret is that underneath all the Oxbridge bravado, the high-flown logophilia and historical exposition (which it excels at deploying with nimble comic flair), it is perhaps his most deeply romantic.

And that’s saying something! The absolute unaccountability both of and for love courses through all Stoppard’s plays like a sparkling rivulet of some combustible chemical: Add it to any stable compound and boom. In Arcadia, sex is “the attraction that Newton left out.” Here, for the Oxford boys who have done more reading or rowing than kissing, the latter is “not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.” Or, as the elder Housman (Greenspan) puts it, with the distance of death, human passion is “farce and folly … abject slavery and all-out war, madness, disease, the whole catastrophe.” It drove the ancient poets to create a brand-new form in order to immortalize their mistresses: “Like everything else,” quips Housman’s college friend Pollard (Daniel Liu, pitch-perfect throughout), “like clocks and trousers and algebra, the love poem had to be invented.” It can bring the most incandescent wit of the age crumbling to his knees (“Oh — Bosie!” weeps Oscar Wilde, wonderfully realized by Sam Bolen, when old Housman encounters his glittering spirit in the Stygian gloom. “Bosie is what became of me”). And it can make a brilliant young man fail his exams and sacrifice the career everyone expected of him so that he can stay close to the beautiful boy that he loves.

This, the play posits, is exactly what young Housman (Yaron Lotan, in a poignant performance that subtly mimics Greenspan’s distinctive timbre) did at the end of his time at Oxford. “I should be cramming, everybody expects me to get a First, you see,” he admits to his older self in one of the play’s delicately orchestrated encounters between the two. (“Well,” says Greenspan’s Housman when their paths first cross, “this is an unexpected development.”) But what the young scholar doesn’t say is that his heart has already dedicated itself, and not to the academy. He is, and always will be, entirely and devastatingly in love with his friend Moses Jackson (José Espinosa, aspen-straight and golden in the memory-play glow of Paige Seber’s lights). “Oh, Mo! Mo!” cries the old man, remembering the young one, “I would have died for you, but I never had the luck!” 

As for Mo himself, there are — as The Invention of Love teases out thematically — the facts of both him and the truth. The facts are that he is handsome, genial, intellectually average, and, while not virulently homophobic, certainly not given to “spooniness.” (“It’s terrible, but it’s not your fault,” he says, blunt and sportsmanlike, when his friend’s feelings finally come clear. “You won’t find me casting the first stone.”) The truth, though, is that to Housman, he is a god. “You want to be brothers-in-arms …” says one of the poet’s friends (Abrar Haque), who sees him and pities him, “to be shipwrecked together, perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him — to die in his arms … You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.”

This is where the shimmering double meaning of Stoppard’s title comes into play. (I left the show — which Elkind stages with an effective blend of buoyancy and stillness on Bridget Lindsay’s spare, purgatorial set — with the feeling the playwright’s work is always capable of delivering in good hands: buzzy, wide awake, like my brain had been washed in seltzer.) Housman and the Oxford men of his era (the self-satisfied faculty members are very funnily embodied by Bolen, Haque, Leland Fowler, and Spencer Lutvak) were fired up by the idea of that electric moment, somewhere in antiquity, when love took poetic form in the way that we still understand and communicate it: Who, they debate, was responsible for that crystalizing flash of genius? Was Catullus the inventor of love? Or was it Propertius, in whose hopelessly corrupted texts the young Housman sees an opportunity to make his editorial mark? (As a textual critic, the real Housman was breathtakingly salty: Those who wish modern criticism were “nicer” may refer to his comment on fellow Latin scholar Robinson Ellis — that Ellis’s readers “were in perpetual contact with the intellect of an idiot child.”) Or did Cornelius Gallus invent the love poem as we know it? We have only a single surviving line of his poetry, but as the elder Housman ruminates, “How much immortality does a man need?”

Or are all these questions, these hot pursuits on which people hang their lives — who did the thing first, what he really said, who can prove it now — only so much “dust and dreams”? Is “the invention of love” not a matter of who created it, as if someone did or could, but of how it creates? (If anyone could describe the difference between those two forms of the genitive, it would be Housman.) “We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention,” says the smiling, sad-eyed Wilde. “Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.”

What this means is that the answer to whether all this — the whole catastrophe, the scholarship and the poetry, the yearning and the ache — amounts to more than a few misprinted scraps in the great cosmic library is, astonishingly and eternally, no and yes. There is no writer like Stoppard for advocating gloriously, with such relish in the argument, for both form and chaos — the miraculous possibility of meaning and the painful, worthwhile human mess that will, for the most part, obscure it. Art, his plays contend and demonstrate, is the synthesis, transcendent because it both organizes and demolishes. As such, it — like love, its progenitor and its progeny — is what will become of us. “You didn’t mention your poems,” says Wilde to Greenspan’s Housman, who is, for a moment, quiet and vulnerable as the two prepare to part on the banks of the Styx. “How can you be unhappy when you know you wrote them? They are all that will still matter.”

The Invention of Love is at Theaterlab through October 3.