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| Arcadia
- The National Theatre
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EVENING
STANDARD - 24.5.94
Nicholas de Jongh
I really warm to Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.
At its 1993 National Theatre premiere
I was, at best, coldly admiring. But second
sight leaves me enthused and amused, and
far less bemused. For in Trevor Nunn's
completely recast and superior new production,
Arcadia emerges in a new light and sharper
focus.
The subject is time, or rather time past,
and the infinite difficulty of recapturing,
interpreting or understanding it. In Stoppard's
dramatic lesson Bernard Nightingale, a
late Thirties Eng. Lit. don from. Sussex
University, is set in sleuthing opposition
to Hannah, a youngish female literary
historian, who turns the 19th century
into popular books.
The field of action is Sidley Park, a
Derbyshire stately home which, in Mark
Thompson's seductive design, is conceived
as a vast room looking out on rolling
countryside. But time does not stand still
in this locale, for Stoppard shifts between
Sidley Park in time present, inhabited
by the well-heeled Coverly family, and
1809, with their forbears in residence.
This familiar theatrical device allows
interesting patterns of dramatic irony
and satire. The audience is well-placed
to appreciate how far-fetched, how preposterous
Nightingale's theories are. He arrives,
fired up by the discovery of a book from
Byron's rediscovered library, which helps
convince him the great poet cuckolded
and duelled with a verse-maker resident
at Sidley. But we have seen the real 1809
picture: the family tutor, sexy young
Septimus Hodge, is having his role as
lecher and duelist usurped.
Bernard leans closish to caricature, but
Roger Allam superbly makes him
a smug and self-important refugee from
Academe, an eye on the main media chance.
He delivers his so-called Byronic findings
to Hannah and Valentine Coverly, a young
mathematician, with the air of a man accustomed
to basking in his own halo. The unromantic
Hannah cuts him down to size and causes
comic pleasure.
Stoppard contrasts Bernard's attempt to
interpret old time with a dash of intimidating
mathematical theory; Valentine suggests
the brilliant teenage Thomasina, his 1809
forbear, had discovered the equivalent
of today's "iterated algorithms", discerning
that you can neither interpret the future
with confidence nor reclaim it. And in
the play's final scene, the figures from
1809 and today are seen united in dance,
knowing they must seize and enjoy the
hour, since they cannot hold the bright
day.
Stoppard's quizzical humanism and wry
amusement in the face of our attempt to
know our world is now more powerful and
poignant. The impressive acting company
contribute greatly to this improvement.
All the performances now carry emotional
and intellectual conviction.
In Trevor Nunn's lucid production, Hannah
is now a convincing literary duelist battling
against the crapulous conceits of Roger
Allam's Bernard - thanks to Joanne
Pearce's combination of sexiness and rigour.
Edward Atterton's Septimus exudes enigma
and Julie Legrand's Lady Croom delights
with her outrage and erotic hauteur. And
as Thomasina, Lucy Whybrow models excitement
and vulnerability. A delight. 
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FINANCIAL
TIMES - 26.5.94
Alastair Macaulay
A Nobel prize winner said on the radio
on Monday that he could keep up with all
the talk about science and Romanticism
in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. I rather pity
him. Trying to keep up with Arcadia is
for us lesser mortals, impossible, exuberant,
and, finally, strangely touching. The
play was exciting when new last year at
the National Theatre but returning to
it, now that it comes to the West End,
is even better - just that bit less bewildering
but no less tantalising. For our failure
to understand everything is part of the
beauty of the play.
Arcadia is all about knowledge - about
the effort to know things, about the mutations
of known things and our ways of knowing
them, and about the ultimate unknowability
of things. It suspends, shimmering in
the air, both knowledge as a human epistemological
endeavour and knowledge as an ultimate
onto-logical fact. Its wit puts one in
mind of Congreve and Wilde, but finally
it comes closer to the forsworn, death-clouded
scholars of Love's Labour's Lost. It says
"Lord! what fools these scholars be",
and then, so tenderly, darts on to knowledge
of life, death, and sex.
Arcadia commutes between two eras: 1809-1812
and the present day. Lord Byron is forever
offstage, much spoken of by characters
in both periods. Romantic sincerity and
Romantic artifice are all-important; and
so is nature - nature as spoilt and reinvented
and investigated by successive humans;
and so is time.
The play cast its spell with its marvellous
original cast last year. This time I admire
Trevor Nunn's direction even more because
he has kept the play virtually as enchanting
with a new and generally inferior cast.
I miss some of the first cast dreadfully
- we are lucky that Radio 3 has twice
broadcast their performance - but I remain
captivated. The best news is that the
two most touching and complex roles, Thomasina
and her young tutor Septimus - are still
very well played by talented young actors.
Lucy Whybrow has Thomasina's febrile intensity
and charming precocity; and Edward Atterton
has the smouldering intensity of the young
Romantic's mind and emotion.
The worst news is that Thomasina's mother
and the revisionist scholar Hannah are
acted terribly - busily, over-emphatically,
weakly - by Julie Legrand and Joanne Pearce.
Roger Allam is a more languid,
classy lecturer than was Bill Nighy; Charles
Simpson a more affected young aristo than
Sam West.
Yet any flaws are minor, for Nunn has
elicited pacing so lucid, and pointing
so natural, that this astonishingly complex
play remains rich in suspense, laughter,
and the excitement of thought. Jeremy
Sams's music, brilliantly crossing historical
periods, is perfect and moving; and so
is the beautiful Georgian round room of
Mark Thompson's set. In this post-modern
work, every rococo embellishment makes
its telling contribution.
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DAILY
TELEGRAPH - 26.5.94
Charles Spencer
GARLANDED with awards, Tom Stoppard's
Arcadia has transferred from the National
to the beautifully refurbished Haymarket
Theatre.
The play, with its discussion of scientific
ideas, and the new mathematics of chaos
theory, fractal geometry, iterated algorithms
and the second law of thermodynamics,
might sound like an insufferable exercise
in intellectual one-upmanship. But it
is an astonishing tour de force. Has there
ever been a play which took more delight
in abstract argument?
But science is only part of the story.
Arcadia, set in a handsome country house
in Derbyshire (a grand classical design
by Mark Thompson) and ranging across the
chasm between 1809 and the present day,
also includes a fascinating discussion
about the changing fashions in landscape
gardening, and a lively running debate
on classicism versus romanticism which
vaults effortlessly across the decades.
But Stoppard is the most genial and welcoming
of writers. Having done all the work himself,
he gives the audience the flattering impression
that we are just as clever as he is. He
expounds ideas with amazing grace, and
succeeds in persuading even an innumerate
physics 0-level failure like myself that
it is quite possible to grasp ideas on
the cutting edge of scientific knowledge.
Best of all, he has managed to present
this discussion in the framework of a
gripping literary detective story that
fizzes with jokes and intellectual joie
de vivre. It's a real pleasure to have
your mind given such an invigorating workout,
marvellous to see a writer swinging such
a impressive sledgehammer against the
wall that divides art and science.
The scenes set in the present day concern
a popular historian, Hannah Jarvis (Joanne
Pearce, fine but not quite as touching
as Felicity Kendal in the original production),
and an unscrupulous, sneering academic,
Bernard Nightingale (Roger Allam,
in terrific form), who are both conducting
research at Sidley Park. Hannah is interested
in the hermit who used to inhabit one
of the follies in the picturesque garden,
Nightingale thinks he is on the verge
of discovering why Byron left England
so percipitately in 1809.
The audience, however, has direct access
to the past, and in alternating scenes
we are able to watch just what was going
on in 1809 when the Sidley Park garden
was being redesigned. In this way Stoppard
offers fascinating glimpses of the way
the past anticipates the present, and
an often hilarious demonstration of how
easy it is for the present to misinterpret
the past.
But what struck me most forcibly about
Arcadia on second viewing is its combination
of a supremely elegant dramatic structure
with a depth-charge of powerful emotion.
The play appeals just as strongly to the
heart as to the head.
There is a surging excitement in its demonstration
of ideas. But we also come to care about
the 13-year-old child prodigy, Thomasina
Coverly (a lovely performance from Lucy
Whybrow), who foresees some of the great
discoveries of modern science, and about
her louche and likeable Byronic tutor
(the excellent Edward Atterton). Their
relationship is observed with tenderness,
and when we finally learn what became
of them tears prick the eyes. For Stoppard,
the realm of the intellect may be a kind
of Arcadia, but death lurks there too.
In the haunting final sequence, in which
the characters seem to dance to the music
of time, this most eloquent of writers
holds his tongue, and Trevor Nunn's production
achieves an emotional resonance that goes
too deep for words.
I have never left a new play more convinced
that I'd just witnessed a masterpiece.
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SUNDAY
TIMES - 29.5.94
John Peter
This is a brilliant, brilliant play. The
word is overused, I know, but in this
case it is appropriate. Consider: "brilliant
a. Bright, sparkling; illustrious, striking;
highly talented, showy". Arcadia sparkles
with wit; its writing glitters with quality
and distinction; it displays one of the
greatest talents working in the theatre
today, at full stretch; and it shows off,
almost flaunts, its gifts with the disarming
arrogance of an artist in confident possession
of his own. I was wrong, wrong, wrong
about this play when I saw its first production
at the Lyttelton just over a year ago.
To call Arcadia cold is to be unresponsive
to its true passion, which is to portray
the painful failure of the intellect to
understand the world. Tom Stoppard has
written two plays in one. One is about
events in a Derbyshire country house in
1809 which may or may not have involved
Lord Byron and a precocious and forgotten
female scientific genius; the other is
about London intellectuals in the same
house 180 years later trying to find out
what really happened. So what is truth?
Is science a form of storytelling and
vice versa? The sheer elegance of Stoppard's
writing, the glitter of his artistry can
almost blind you to his technical assurance
and his investigative vigour. This may
be why Arcadia is one of those plays that
do not yield up their true values on first
acquaintance. If you have seen this play,
see it again; if you have not, see it
soon so as to give yourself time to see
it a second time. Not all the cast rises
to its demands; but there is as magnificent
performance from Roger Allam as
the academic peacock, all masterful complacency
and waspish put down. Joanne Pearce is
his adversary: like a battleaxe pretending
not very successfully to be a silver butter
knife. A play of ideas, of consummate
theatricality, of sophisticated entertainment
and of heartache for time never to be
regained.
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GUARDIAN
- 25.5.94
Michael Billington
FEW PLAYS gain more from a second
viewing than Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.
At the Lyttelton one was swept along
by the play's intellectual energy
and emotional dynamic. Now it has
transferred to the Haymarket with
a new cast, one begins to see the
work more dearly: as a meditation
on mortality and on the unpredictability
of human behaviour and the natural
world.
From the start of his career, Stoppard
has been haunted by the opposition
of determinism and free will, order
and chaos. Here he seems reconciled
both to human transience and what
Lear called "the mystery of things".
In the 1809 part of the play, tutor
Septimus reassures pupil Thomasina,
grieving over the burning of the library
at Alexandria, that nothing is lost
in the cycle of history: "we shed
as we pick up, like travellers who
must carry everything in their arms,
and what we let fall will be picked
up by those behind."
We see how that
idea pays off in the present day when
Thomasina's doodlings on the chaos
theory and the second law of thermodynamics
are being developed by Valentine,
her distant kin. But Stoppard's point
is that there is a special exhilaration
about living in a time when Newtonian
determinism is under fire and "when
almost everything you thought you
knew is wrong."
Other ideas crowd in: classicism versus
romanticism, historical reality versus
academic interpretation. But even
if Stoppard is occasionally guilty,
like Thomasina, of "doing more than
was asked", his fine play is buoyed
up by its inquisitive humanism. And
Trevor Nunn's production sits better
in the more intimate Haymarket.
In the present, Joanne Pearce as the
seemingly hard-hearted Hannah, a popular
historian reminds us that even Enlightenment
values have an emotiona1 base. Equally,
Roger Allam as an ego-tripping,
fame hungry Sussex academic shows
that his soul can still be stirred
by great poetry. And, in the past,
Edward Atterton as Septimus and Lucy
Whybrow as Thomasina, touchingly show
how intellectual enquiry is illuminated
by romantic attachment. All of which
contributes to Stoppard's moving central
theme: the way human character echoes
the determinedly unpredictable nature
of the universe itself.
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