Review: Arcadia
Wherever you go, there it is, the past, whistling down through the ages sometimes mellifluous sometimes discordant. We can tune out. And often do…to live in the present and focus on the chores of the day. Most of us can’t afford to do anything else.
Not in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. A modern day family is united in their family’s past: the Coverleys. (An intriguing form of naval gazing which can only be indulged by a particular strata of the middle-classes). Certainly, there is no room for anything as trivial as everyday life. Ergo, the timeless setting is an English country house, Sidley Park, which hosts characters spanning 200 years, half of whom are focussed on the future while the other half crane to get a better a look at the past. Somewhere in the middle lies an unseen, never confirmed, meeting point which makes for some touching dramaturgy later in the play.
The story centres on the young Thomasina Coverly (Isis Hainsworth) who invents the idea of iterated algorithms. She is; however, doomed to live in the wrong age (1809) whereupon her only tools are pencil and paper with a dedicated tutor Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane) for company; a man whose hobby might best be described as ‘cuckolding’. The play starts with one such occasion: he has sex with the wife of Ezra Chater (Matthew Steer)…a man so conceited as to take every questionable remark made of him as a compliment. Setting a running theme of Hodge insulting/complimenting Chater at every possible turn. Hodge’s affections are never satiated and we are led to believe something may have happened with Thomasina’s mother, Lady Croom (Yolanda Kettle). Croom is happy with her daughter’s educational setup as long as she is not yet 17 (whereupon she must marry).
The play focusses on a time in history which is, mathematically speaking, an intercept: Newtons 2nd Law, Fermat’s Last Theorem, fractals, chaos theory, determinism, iterated algorithms, classicism, romanticism, and Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine. In this narrative thread we learn of Thomasina’s questioning nature which nicely offsets Septimus humorous cynicism. He generously recognises her aptitude for research and assists her up to the point she overtakes him. This world, whilst intellectual, is the beating heart of the play and full credit to Hainsworth: this character could easily come across as a precocious brat. In Hainsworth’s capable hands, she is likeable, warm and good company.
The modern day narrative centres on the professional relationship between academic, Bernard Nightingale (Oliver Chris) and researcher Hannah Jarvis (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Nightingale’s theory is that Byron stayed at Sidley Park and conducted an affair with Mrs Chater (both unseen characters) before then killing Ezra Chater. The significant failing here is that these two characters do not feature in the 12-strong cast and it is difficult to care what either think about Byron or Mrs Chater. Whilst there is focus on Coverley’s descendent, Valentine (Angus Cooper) whose modelling capabilities reveal Thomasina’s limitations, it lacks sufficient traction. The back and forth between Nightingale and Jarvis (who is researching the history of the garden) never wholly convinces and it is sometimes hard to understand why Valentine and Chloe Coverley (Holly Godliman) tolerate it. Arcadia is stylised so that each arc, each strand, each argument represents a battle of ideas: rational versus romanticism, gothic versus picturesque, heat versus light. At one point, Nightingale gives a full, unadulterated maths lecture. It is during these moments where Arcadia’s gossamer veneer of characterisation betrays its cerebral dialectic. A composite is best experienced as a whole where the laminate is unobserved. Arcadia is a beautifully densely layered cake, each granularly rich ply meshing with the next, all of it resulting in a heady concoction of intellectual wistfulness. For me, the topics were not sufficiently subsumed into the wider narrative swerving uncomfortably close to taunting the audience with their intellectual inadequacies.
Towards the end of the play, Carrie Cracknell’s beautiful staging aesthetically merges the modern with the historical where; finally, humanity takes centre-stage.
Arcadia continues its run at the Duke of York’s Theatre London until 12th September.