Hampstead Theatre is quite small and from my experience of the place I knew that seats at the back are still good and so I went for Dress Circle Row C Seat 20 at £36. Frustratingly they have changed the seat numbering, there use to be just one sequence of rows A to (at least) N, so it is hard to compare with previous visits, which is the whole point of me noting seat numbers and prices.
All I knew about the play was that the subject was A E Housman, and I had forgotten that by the time that the performance day arrived.
And all I knew about A E Housman was that he wrote the poem A Shropshire Lad which did not help as the play was about his life as a Latin scholar, which I did not know anything about.
The play started with Housman's death and took a look back at his time as a young man at Oxford University.
There were lots of discussions about the Classics including the accuracy of the various sources and subsequent translations. I am not a Classicist but I actually found these discussions quite interesting, perhaps encouraged by recently seeing The Browning Version which played in the same area.
The students were less interesting, other then as a view on life at that time, thought there was a marked change when Wilde made a late appearance and risked stealing the show..
The Invention of Love came across as theatre for theatre purists, the construction of the play was intelligent, the staging was interesting and effective, and the cast was strong. I am not sure that it needed a big name to play the old A E Housman but I am am not going to object to seeing Simon Russell Beale on stage again.
In many ways The Invention of Love was really not my thing but the quality of the show won me over and I enjoyed it immensely.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are welcome. Comments are moderated only to keep out the spammers and all valid comments are published, even those that I disagree with!