The Invention of Love

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.