Tom Stoppard, if you’ll pardon the expression, is right up my alley. I’m a literature student, and his plays are witty, romantic, wordy and nerdy. I love him, a little. Of course, I’m fully aware that if I were - I don’t know - a Natsci, or a Chelsea footballer, I’d think he was a complete git.

Anyway, The Invention of Love is all about the poet A. E. Housman, and the relationships he forms whilst an undergraduate at Oxford. Relationships with Moses Jackson, with whom he was madly in love; a scholar called A. W. Pollard; the poetry of antiquity, and some little-known chap called Oscar Wilde. Beginning just after Housman’s death, the play opens on the desolate banks of the river Styx, with the poet waiting for Charon the boatman. The old Housman, played rather finely by Joshua Stamp-Simon, seemed suitably erudite and witty for an aged poet, though at a supposed age of 77, he did seem a touch on the spritely side.

What’s more, the Oxford trio were pretty well cast. Young Housman was played just about note-perfect by Oskar McCarthy, Moses Jackson by a confident Jason Forbes and Pollard, despite the odd line-fluff, by an enthusiastic James Frecknall. The only flaw from these chaps was the entire absence of chemistry between McCarthy and Forbes. I know Housman kept his cards notoriously close to his chest, and that Forbes was heterosexual, but honestly, Jackson was supposed to be the great unrequited love of his life - not the milkman.

Anyway, that aside, the standard was pretty good. Support came, in the main, from Laurie Coldwell, James Hancock-Evans, Joshua Pugh Ginn and William Morland. Doubling-, and in some cases tripling-up parts, all spoke very well, if their changes in character were a fraction too slight. In fact, it did all get a bit muddy at one point – what the fuck is Walter Pater doing editing The Saturday Review!? Oh, wait, he’s being Frank Harris now. I see.

Still, McCarthy and Stamp-Simon captured Housman’s tone perfectly, and allowed Stoppard’s biting wit to sear off the page. The more clinical members of Varsity’s readership might imagine analysis of the ins-and-outs of latin poetry to be blunt and difficult, but the cast managed to tap into the script’s enthusiasm to discover the lightness at the centre of studies of Catullus and Lucan.

The set wasn’t particularly strong: a lazy gobo of an Oxford skyline, a farcically cramped boat, and a series of bizarrely-shaped bookshelves . And to my major beef: that of the play’s attitude to Wilde. He appears in one scene, despite being talked about constantly, and was played to the super-gay hilt by Amrou Al-Kadhi. Though suitably vibrant, and popular with the audience, I thought his portrayal of a post-Reading-Gaol Wilde was just well off. After all, this is Oscar Wilde we’re talking about, not Gok Wan.

This is a hilarious and remarkable play, and it was pulled off with enough waistcoat panache to convince. From a Stoppard obsessive, that’s a serious endorsement.