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.

Praise for The Invention of Love: 

“So beautifully constructed that the playwright seems to be discovering his play only one jump ahead of the audience. It has that sense of surprise and wonder.”—New York Times

“Some of the finest, most passionate, and most disarmingly brilliant dramatic writing that he has given us.”—Financial Times

“A magical memory play which meanders like an elaborate dream . . . The most emotionally powerful and enthralling play of his career. Never before has [Stoppard] written with such exciting eloquence.”—Evening Standard

“Tom Stoppard at his best; manipulative, inquisitive, irresistible . . . A master at work.”—Sunday Times (UK)