Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia – revived by Bedlam this week and about which much lower down – opened April 13, 1993 at London’s National Theatre in an exquisite production directed by Trevor Nunn and featuring Felicity Kendall, Harriet Walter, Rufus Sewall, Billy Nighy, and Samuel West, among seven others.
As a Stoppard fan attending a later performance, I had long admired him (who hadn’t?) for the intelligence and wit that deeply infused his introductory Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and then accumulating works. But after the likes of, for instance, the superb Travesties (1974) and The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia was something else again. The workings of the heart that often went unexamined by the exceptional wordsmith were suddenly revealed, their emotions newly displayed.
On the surface Arcadia is an acrobatic blend of elements, some graspable and at least one teasingly elusive. Taking place in two eras – 1809-12 and the present (well, the 1990s), it most immediately deals with the transition from the Age of Reason to a more romantic, if increasingly chaotic, age. (Surely, it can also stand for Stoppard’s sense, consciously or not, of his own dramaturgical development.)
As the action proceeds, much of it at a stately home called Sidley Park, Stoppard handles subjects as catchall as Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron (who was believed to be a Sidley Park visitor), Euclid and Isaac Newton, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, chaos theory, iterated algorithms, and, of course, the forever vaunted English gardens. Additional issues too numerous to mention are dexterously maneuvered. (Note: Stoppard makes certain nothing he includes is difficult to follow. Okay, even if he doesn’t quite accomplish that, he succeeds at the whole eventually overpowering the sum of its abundant parts.)
The most esoteric concept polymath Stoppard blithely drops in is Fermat’s Theorem, formulated in 1637 by the mathematician Pierre de Fermat. It involves numbers in an elusive equation that remained unproved until 1995 and therefore had yet to be settled when Stoppard was writing. (Was the playwright’s inclusion of it somehow prescient? Is Stoppard, along with all his profuse talents, also visionary? Just asking.)
No need to explain Fermat’s Theorem further (not that this reviewer could) and no need to worry ticket buyers about the need to absorb any more of its implications. What’s immediately pertinent is Stoppard’s charming and quite precocious 13-year-old heroine Thomasina (Caroline Grogan). As Arcadia opens, she’s introduced to the Fermat puzzler by smart, womanizing tutor Septimus Hodge (Shaun Taylor-Corbett). Thomasina is signally important, as it’s through her maturity and Septimus awakening to it that Stoppard advances from his former amazing and consistently amusing university-grad abilities.
Not that most of the other Arcadia figures don’t wax and wane compellingly through the two-act proceedings and across the centuries. Sidley Park’s Lady Croom (Lisa Birnbaum) is histrionic about the plans landscape architect Mr. Noakes (Jamie Smithson) has that would transform her formal gardens into seemingly untamed acreage. Poet Ezra Chater (Randolph Curtis Rand) strongly objects to tutor Hodge’s dalliance with his never seen wife.
Those are the 1809 goings-on. During the here and now, author Hannah Jarvis (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and writing don Bernard Nightingale (Elan Zafir) clash over a Sidley Park past during which Lord Byron, a Septimus schoolmate, may not only have been present but involved in a questionable duel. There’s also mystery surrounding a hermit known to have inhabited the grounds back in the day. Additionally populating this frenzied timeframe are computer scientist and biologist Valentine (Mike Labbadia) and Chloe (Deychen Volino-Gyetsa), busily flaunting their hang-ups.
Which brings us in due time to director and Bedlam artistic director Eric Tucker’s take on Arcadia, a play frequently considered the best of the last 50 years. This time the masterpiece doesn’t exactly have that effect. Giving the script a spin – as Tucker regularly likes to do – he comes up with notions that might even have audiences questioning the play and its exalted reputation.
The director’s most striking approach to the difference between the early 1800s and the late 1900s is that the earlier inhabitants often give themselves over to yelling at each other more than the several-generations-later folks do, Thomasina and Septimus the 1809-12 exceptions. The off-putting histrionics overshadow Stoppard’s intellectual points.
For the first half, audience members face the actors and scenic designer John McDermott’s divided set – the stage left section depicting Sidley Park’s sprawling lawns, the stage right a modern study. Also at stage left is a fake tortoise that appears in both eras supposedly crawling about. (Is it another of Stoppard’s comment on time’s pace?)
For the second act, Tucker switches the actors and the audience. Now seated on the former stage an on decorative white chairs, spectators watch the actors constantly change places in the rows. The rearrangement is initially a head-scratcher, but Tucker’s reasoning appears to be explained by a flowery program-note statement: “Bedlam creates works of theatre that reinvigorate traditional forms in a collective, raw space…”
The description continues, but that’s enough to justify Tucker’s take on the final Arcadia scenes during which Stoppard’s two sets of characters increasingly overlap and evidently – at least according to Tucker – meld into one another, perhaps as exemplars of Albert Einstein’s theory about space-time relativity.
Notably distinguishing themselves in a revival that only skirts the edges of unfortunate hodgepodge are Taylor-Corbett, Szadkowski, Zafir, Labbadia, and the extraordinarily lovely Grogan, who shines throughout with an inner light. Praise be to them – and to Stoppard at an alienating remove.
Arcadia opened November 12, 2023, at the West End Theater and runs through January 7, 2024. Tickets and information: bedlam.org
