Hampstead theatre, London
The quicksilver actor is a vocal glory as the poet and classicist AE Housman looking back at his younger, tormented self in Tom Stoppard’s play

A man arrives at the underworld. “I’m dead, then,” says AE Housman. “Good.” Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play conjures the poet and classicist, whose heart and mind were brimming but who never quite lived – decades-long adoration for a man who couldn’t love him back, searing poetry which he undervalued, a capacity for love which never sang.

Simon Russell Beale’s elderly Housman looks back at Matthew Tennyson, wonderfully beady and forlorn as his younger self, in thrall to his oblivious pal Moses Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes). The quicksilver Russell Beale is a vocal glory, leaping in a breath from flute to poignant bassoon, from wit to sorrow.