First-night nerves were compounded for the cast of The Invention of Love by the presence in the stalls of its author Tom Stoppard. “It was bloody nerve-wracking,” said actor Joseph Robertson afterwards. He must have been pleased, though, to find his words spliced into an interview with Sir Tom in which his performance as A. E. Housman as a young man – and that of Matthew Osman, who played the poet and classicist in old age – were described as “excellent”. Stoppard added: “The two young actors were particularly wonderful.”

I thought so too. Theirs was the major contribution to the success of this first-class student production of a play too little seen since its National Theatre premiere in 1997. Its focus is Housman and his esoteric classicism. Wow! you needed to listen carefully to take in the torrent of abstruse theory and academic bitchery, and to savour witty allusions and asides with which Stoppard, in typical fashion, drenches the script.

Specifically, its concern is with Housman’s love life, his buttoned-up homosexuality – truly Victorian in the sense that word usually implies – measured against the grab-at-anything lust displayed by his Oxford contemporary Oscar Wilde – and found wanting.

“Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light,” as Wilde puts it during an affecting meeting with Housman. Played by Andrew McCormack, the playwright appeared too studiedly camp on the opening night but this had been toned down to propduce a much more credible portrayal when I saw the production again later in the week.

The many real-life characters in this affectionate recreation of Oxford University in its ‘golden age’, as the older Housman describes it, were well presented, especially in the look and dress of these now slightly preposterous figures. There was particularly fine work from Guy Westwood, as the formidable Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, pictured above with Riversdale Waldegrave’s John Ruskin, some of whose magisterial utterances, alas, got lost in that tremendous beard.

Nothing in the production, ably directed by Roger Granville, was finer than the scene – it seems outrageously daring artistically but works brilliantly – in which the two Housmans meet and talk, the one so full of hope for the future, the other uncomfortable in the knowledge of where it was all to lead.

The older man’s greatest regret was that he was never able to express his love, in physical terms, for the strapping Oxford athlete Moses Jackson (the excellent Jonathan Webb) who remained the passion of his life. The gripping scene in which the reality of their friendship is revealed was another highlight of this memorable production.

Two other top-class performance also deserve mention – those of Philip Bartlett as Housman’s Oxford friend Pollard and Thomas Woodward as a later pal, the ‘out’ gay Chamberlain, the only invented character in his utterly true to life (achingly so) play.