Simon Russell Beale is one of our greatest classical actors but he never lets it look like hard work. He can turn anyone from King Lear to Prospero, from Hamlet to Falstaff, into a guy it’s a delight to spend an evening with. And when he’s not been tackling Shakespeare over the past 40 years he’s often also been making the verbal gyrations of Tom Stoppard feel like a doddle.

He got his first Tony award nomination in 2004 for playing a moral philosopher with marriage problems in a revival of Stoppard’s Jumpers. But his new role in The Invention of Love is a different level of challenge. Stoppard’s much-loved 1997 play puts the Oxford academic and poet AE Housman in the afterlife, then bombards its audience with wit, wisdom and enough classical allusions to sink a trireme.

You’d have thought that, aged 63, a knight of the realm since 2019 and a Tony winner in 2022 (for The Lehman Trilogy), this critics’ darling would be far beyond suffering from impostor syndrome. Meet him, though, and while his intelligence is as tangible as his affability, so is his self-questioning. I ask him if he had any qualms about playing Housman after two years off stage — the longest fallow period in his 40-year career. “Of course,” he says, sitting on a huge sofa in the offices of the Hampstead Theatre during a break from rehearsals. “I saw a very great actor do it. And you wonder if it is too soon for a revival …”

What’s more, the play is brilliant but undeniably dense. When its original director, Richard Eyre, first read it he admitted: “I can’t see the wood for the wood or the trees for the trees.” Here, gloriously, is an unabashedly clever play about unabashedly clever people, and about the glories and the limits of that cleverness. Housman was gay, as is Beale, and much of the play is about Housman’s unrequited love for an undergraduate, Moses Jackson.

Beale gurgles appealingly at the thought of Eyre’s initial bamboozlement. “Tom quite likes doing that, doesn’t he? Yes, there are some sentences in this where you do go, ‘I wish there were something slightly simpler here.’ But he loves to amuse and he writes good, funny lines. And actually it’s all about love. I think Tom’s plays are always like that. It’s about love and loneliness and solitude and defining your isolation. Tom doesn’t hide that sort of passion in his plays but he deflects our attention.”

 

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The Invention of Love plays on the Main Stage until 1 February.

 

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