Set in a "dream-warp" as the dead Housman (referred to as AEH, and played by a riveting John Wood) makes his final trip across the River Styx, the play is a stream-of-consciousness This Is Your Life, featuring the friends (Moses Jackson, Housman's unrequited love), politicians (Henry Labouchere, who introduced the English law against homosexuality), Oxford scholars (most of whose work Housman treated with disdain) and contemporaries (including his dramatic foil, Oscar Wilde) who had a direct or indirect impact on Housman's life. The most prominent character in AEH's confused memory is the young Housman; played by Paul Rhys, he is the epitome of a buttoned-up student who has spent too much time indoors.

At the beginning, both characters exude the cockiness and cold intellect so evident in Housman's critical writings. But as the play progresses, the young Housman's inner torment and the old AEH's burgeoning regrets come to the surface, and the two halves' meeting in the first act is electrifying. Their confluent discussion of classical texts is energetic and convinces even the most Latin-phobic of the passion, if not the point, of their scholarship. As the dialogue plays out, though, they reach a poignant realization about their life's choice--denying their emotions--from which neither can escape. AEH finally tells his younger self: "I wish I could help you, but it's not in my gift."

In the intimate Cottesloe Theatre, director Richard Eyre's simple production lowers the hurdles set up by the highbrow concepts in the play. Not that Stoppard doesn't help out the audience. His characteristic wit is in good form, and Big Ideas are broken down for public consumption. One Oxford professor explains the impossibility of recovering a definitive version of an ancient text by talking about secretaries who can't take dictation. "Anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice," he says. "And the earliest copy that has come down to us was written about 1,500 years after that. Think of all those secretaries!"

Though Wilde only appears at the end of the play, he is a constant presence. Housman and Wilde, who overlapped at Oxford for one year, never met, but each evidently had an effect on the other's life. The shock and excitement surrounding Wilde's 1895 trial for "gross indecency" with another man inspired Housman to put his tortured love for Moses Jackson into verse. The result, A Shropshire Lad, is a fatalistic collection of poems that one of Stoppard's characters sums up as "Life's a curse, love's a blight, God's a blaggard, cherry blossom is quite nice." Wilde had a friend recite Housman's works to him in jail.

In Stoppard's imagination, the meeting between the two serves as a climax in Housman's assessment of his life. They are the representatives of "renunciation and folly," as AEH puts it. He expresses pity for Wilde's "terrible" life, but by the end of the encounter it's not so clear who had made the worse decisions. "I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters," says Wilde. "I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new...Where were you when all this was happening?" AEH, like J. Alfred Prufrock, can only say, "At home."

Housman's misfortune was to be a poet who lived a long life, without having lived. "To dream of taking the sword in the breast, the bullet in the brain," the broken AEH says, "and wake up to find the world goes wretchedly on and you will die of age and not of pain." He considers his scholarship, with much unfinished, his "sand-castle against the confounding sea." The Invention of Love, in humanizing Housman and his work, has gone a long way in making that castle stone.