Arcadia

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, currently in its first major London revival – at the Duke of York’s Theatre – since premiering at the National in 1993, is without doubt a dazzling play, displaying in abundance the playwright’s prodigious gifts of stagecraft, erudition and wit. As it fizzes from the early nineteenth century to the present day, interweaving histories of physics and English garden design with elements of a country house farce and the literary mystery of Lord Byron’s hasty disappearance abroad in 1809, you almost wonder whether a flamenco might more aptly represent the dance of ideas than the waltz with which the play ends.

The Arcadia of the title is Sidley Park, Derbyshire, the stately home of the Coverly family, in whose garden room all the play’s action takes place. That action begins in 1809 with Septimus Hodge’s tuition of 13-year-old Thomasina, the exceedingly intelligent daughter of the household, being interrupted when Hodge – whose friend Byron is also staying there – receives a challenge to a duel from Ezra Chater, whom he has cuckolded in the gardens’ gazebo. At the same time, to the horror of Lady Croom, mistress of the household and many of its visitors, those gardens are about to be redesigned in the wild, unkempt Romantic style.

In the present-day scenes with which the historical ones alternate, two researchers descend upon the Coverly household: would-be “media don” Bernard Nightingale, intent on showing that Byron fled England after killing Chater in a duel at Sidley Park, and Hannah Jarvis, writing the history of the Classical and Romantic movements through that of the garden and its hermit. Together with Val Coverly, a young scientist writing a doctorate on grouse population, she comes to suspect that Thomasina and the hermit after her were working, far ahead of their time, on the mathematics of the heat death of the universe.

This all adds up to what sounds like an absurdly convoluted plot, but this being Stoppard (and a fine production by David Leveaux) you don’t really notice. The wit is Wildean (perhaps self-consciously so as Lady Croom reprimands her brother: “Do not dabble in paradox, Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit”), with some entertaining and surely unprecedented mix-ups between sex and physics (in a discussion of “the action of bodies in heat”) thrown in. Leveaux manages to keep the play’s pace without losing any of its jokes – quite a feat – and Nancy Carroll (as Lady Croom) and Septimus (Dan Stevens) make the most of having the best lines.

It is this lightness of touch that allows Stoppard to develop such a range of ideas; also, by identifying characters with, though not reducing them to, ideas – Hannah displays Classical reserve and method, whilst Bernard Romantically puts ‘feeling’ on a pedestal – he can develop both at once. Hannah (Samantha Bond) is attracted in spite of herself to Bernard’s passion for his research, even as he insists (wrongly) that his gut instinct about the duel should be favoured over her analysis of the evidence. Neil Pearson’s Bernard is slimy and self-satisfied but impressive enough in full flow to render plausible Hannah’s continued tolerance. Stoppard’s suggestion is that Classical rigour, though essential, does not suffice without some Romantic passion, though that passion need not be as priapic as Bernard’s.

His admiration for that rigour, displayed also in his depiction of the great Latinist A.E. Housman in The Invention of Love, shines forth in a play profoundly concerned with the worth of human learning, whether historical or scientific, the pursuit of which is one of Stoppard’s competing answers to the death that lurks even in Arcadia (“et in Arcadia ego”). As Hannah tells Val, “It’s all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron…It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.”

The other answer could be love, but, for all its sex (“the attraction which Newton left out”), Arcadia sees a veritable procession of frustrated lovers: Thomasina loves Septimus who loves Lady Croom who loves Lord Byron; Chloe loves Bernard who, like Valentine and his brother Gus, loves Hannah unrequitedly. In this respect as well as its faith in the value of learning, Arcadia is a very moving play, striking the balance between Romantic feeling and Classical order. David Leveaux’s production dazzles, but is to be commended for not being content with that alone – it preserves the heart of Stoppard’s play.