STAGE: Tom Stoppard's Arcadia - Nottingham Playhouse

Arcadia is Tom Stoppard’s play currently on at the Nottingham Playhouse.  It is a brilliant production and very funny and thought-provoking.  The thing that comes across most strongly is the importance of the arts and literature and how these relate to the sciences.

The play uses the device of switching between the early 19^th century and the present day, and features a cast of characters in both worlds which represent in some shape or form the arts.  

Byron also haunts the 19^th century plot offstage, an invisible trickster who represents genuine poetic talent and remains aloof.  The poet who we do see onstage, Ezra Chater is not aloof – he is the anti-Byron in fact, a nervous cuckold desperate for the recognition of his peers.  He lacks talent and isn’t interested in poetry as a way of examining some unknown truth but as a way to do well.  He turns out to be a botanist, and not very good at that either.

Arcadia is Tom Stoppard’s play ending tonight at the Nottingham Playhouse.  It is a brilliant production and very funny and thought-provoking.  The thing that comes across most strongly is the importance of the sciences and how these relate to the arts and literature.

In the 21^st century, literature is represented not by poets but by academics portrayed as detectives of the past.  Bernard Nightingale is the career academic who doesn’t care about discovering the truth unless it gets him in the papers, and this aspect of his character parallels Chater’s.  Spotting the parallels between the two settings is where much of the fun and the comedy of the play comes from. A lot also comes from Nightingale himself who is a brilliant buffoon who gets his comeuppance and is brilliantly played by David Bark-Jones.

The play uses the device of switching between the present day and the early 19^th century, and features a cast of characters in both worlds which represent in some shape or form the sciences.  The tutor Septimus Hodge and his pupil Thomasina Coverly have inquiring minds and enjoy exploring ideas (well, Septimus enjoys it as a break from sleeping with the ladies of the house).  Through the eyes of Thomasina something like mathematics feels like exciting new territory to be explored.

So, by the present day, literature has become something that needs decoding like a maths puzzle – indeed something where the lives of authors overshadows their works to a certain extent.  This difference in perception is conveyed in a wonderful detail of direction – in the past, the signed manuscript of Chater’s worthless poem is pawed by the characters with unconscious disdain.  In the present it is handled by Nightengale and Hannah Jarvis (his more reasonable, less self-serving equivalent) with delicacy and reverence. 

In the 21^st century the sciences are mainly represented by Valentine, a man who while not exactly cynical about mathematics is currently frustrated by the subject – he has found Thomasina’s exercise book from 200 years ago and has become mildly obsessed with understanding it.  Maths isn’t new territory to be explored in his mind but, like an obscure poem, a code from the past to be cracked.

His explanations of algorithms, of recurring patterns that emerge when examining a specific group of figures sums up what is happening in the play very nicely.  Everything between the two worlds seems apart but then parallels begin to be drawn and soon patterns within both eras emerge that are so similar they can completely merge.  The past begins to interact with the present literally and obliviously as if life is some mathematical equation which reminded me of Douglas Adams’ work.  I would say the work of fiction most similar to Arcadia is Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency with its blend of comedy and inquisitive interest in science).

By the end of the play, Valentines explanation of how nature moves in traceable algorithms is paralleled by the modern and old worlds integrated in a form of organised chaos – there is a conversation going on and by closing ones eyes to who is actually talking it becomes perfectly coherent.  The present is always, painfully, going to die at the hands of the present, Et In Arcadia Ego.  The party that ends the modern part of the play will end because death is present even in Arcadia.  Thomasina’s death at the age of 17 is tossed away as a piece of trivia in the present, she too was once an Arcadian.  This chaos is moving and feels like it comes from our knowledge that these lines that seemingly interact with each other over the centuries, and I can safely say it is the first time I have been moved so much by something so firmly rooted in the intellectual and also the first time I have been made to think so much about the root of emotion in the theatre.