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by Tom Stoppard, directed by Eda Holmes

Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

July 31-September 14, 2013;

Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto

November 9-December 14, 2014

Hannah: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter”

The Shaw Festival’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia sold out even before the show opened.  This fact shows both that the Shaw Festival audience is hungry to see this play, often considered Stoppard’s finest, and that the Shaw Festival audience is already certain the Festival will do a fine job in presenting the play.  As it happens, the audience’s trust in the Festival is justified since the Festival does an excellent job in presenting Stoppard’s complex 1993 play that is as comic as it is intellectually stimulating.

The play is set in a garden room in Sidley Park, an English country house, in two different time periods.  The scenes in the early 19th century, about 1809-12, focus on Septimus Hodge (Gary Powell), who is tutoring the precocious daughter of the house, Thomasina Coverly (Kate Besworth).  The scenes in the present focus on the attempt of two rival scholars, Hannah Jarvis (Diana Donnelly) and Bernard Nightingale (Patrick McManus), to determine what happened in the house during the period 1809-12.  Jarvis is writing a book about hermits in English Romantic gardens and wants to know all there is about the hermit who supposedly resided at Sidley Park after it was converted from a Neoclassical garden to a Romantic garden by the landscape garden designer Richard Noakes (Ric Reid).  Nightingale is searching for the reason no one has every explained why the poet Lord Byron fled England in 1809.  Nightingale is convinced that Byron stayed at Sidley Park and fought a duel there over a woman which necessitated his departure.  Valentine Coverly (Martin Happer), the present master of the house and a graduate student in mathematics, helps both Bernard and Hannah in their research but discovers that Thomasina has been working on mathematical theories that were far in advance of her time.

The principal form of humour in the 19th-century scenes is Stoppard’s spot-on imitation of the type of witty dialogue familiar from 18th-century comedy.  Lady Croom (Nicole Underhay), the domineering head of the house, flirts with all the men around her, especially Septimus, while a would-be poet and guest at the house, Ezra Chater (Andrew Bunker), is incensed at the assignations his (unseen) wife keeps having throughout their stay, including one with Septimus.  The principal form of humour in the scenes set in the present is the satire of academics, trying to one-up each other while completely failing to understand the scenes of the past that we have just witnessed. 

While the failure to understand the past has its comic side, Stoppard’s play also emphasizes its tragic side.  During her classical studies with Septimus, Thomasina mentions how terrible the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 48bc was because so much accumulated knowledge of humanity was destroyed.  Meanwhile, we learn in the present that Thomasina had come up with ideas now known as fractals, chaos theory and entropy more than a century ahead of anyone else.  Thomasina’s knowledge, however, was also lost, because she died in a fire on the eve of her seventeenth birthday, the last day we see in the play’s 19th-century scenes.  Of these theories entropy is the presiding metaphor for the play, specifically the notion of the so-called “heat death” of the universe formulated by Lord Kelvin in 1852 that all energy in the universe will eventually dissipate resulting in the end of all physical phenomena.  Thomasina discovers this intuitively when she notes that you can stir jam into rice pudding but you cannot unstir it. 

The primary flaw of Eda Holmes’s lively direction is that she tends to emphasize the comedy of the play at the expense of specific tragedy of Thomasina’s death and the generally melancholy view of the world that her genius discovers.  Because of this the ending Holmes’ production is much less moving than was the Canadian stage production of the play in 1996.  Holmes would do well to remember that the title of the play derives from the phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” that comes from the inscription on a tomb of the shepherd Daphnis in Virgil’s Eclogues (c. 44-38bc).  The meaning is that death is present even in the idyllic world of Arcadia.

The secondary flaw of Holmes’ direction is in not making the relationships of the characters as clear as they should be.  In the 1996 production and even in a 2009 student production at Hart House, I was never in doubt, as I was here, about who was who and how the people in the present were related to those in the past.  These relationships have to be clear because Stoppard gives us so much else in the fields of poetry, landscape gardening, physics and mathematics to think about.

The central item of furniture in the play is a large table that remains in place through the scenes both in the present and past.  In other productions directors have use the table to make the characters importance and interrelations clear.  The head of the household would sit at the head of the table and equivalent characters would use the same seats in each time period.  It’s a simple but effective method that Holmes does not use.  We gather that Lady Croom is the head of the household in the past but Diana Donnelly’s perfect ease in the house, including walking barefoot when she wishes, makes one easily mistake her character Hannah as the head in the present rather than Valentine.  Situating the table on a diagonal in relation to the audience makes symbolic use of the table more difficult than when it is (more logically) placed parallel to the stage opening and the windows behind it. 

The acting is marvellous.  The actors who play the 19th-century characters are so good at delivering one barbed, epigrammatic line after the next it’s a pity the Shaw mandate doesn’t include the century before Shaw’s birth.  Kate Besworth is a wonderful Thomasina, filled with enthusiasm and constant questioning of the status quo.  We see Thomasina’s crush on her tutor well before he is aware of it.  As for Septimus, Gray Powell presents us with a character who is disturbed that the stability of the Newtonian world view is upset by his pupil’s discoveries.  What he could make clearer is that Septimus’ personal life is also upset by his growing attraction for his pupil. 

Nicole Underhay is delectable as the imperious yet flirtatious Lady Croom, who pays people to understand things for her.  Andrew Bunker is equally funny as the pathetic poet Ezra Chater, who one moment flies into a rage about his promiscuous wife only to be instantly tamed by flattery of his poetry.  Ric Reid is comically immune to criticism about his ghastly plans to Gothicize Sidley Park’s beautiful grounds.      

Young Damon McLeod is the only actor to appear in scenes in both periods as Augustus Coverly.  He is a trouble-maker in the past but mute and helpful in the present.  McLeod lends him an appropriate aura of mystery.  We wonder what he symbolizes – the muteness of youth in face of the foolishness of modern adults or the loss of innocent youthful enquiry that Thomasina represents.  In any case, Stoppard has him silently find the key that links the past with the present that renders all the moderns’ wordy speculation nonsense.

Sue LePage has designed beautiful neoclassical set and colourful costumes that immediately evoke the two contrasting periods.  She helps in Stoppard’s plan to blur the dividing line deliberately when at the end the moderns put on 19th-century fancy dress and characters from both periods appear on stage together.

The play is like a large intellectual puzzle that will have you hanging onto every word in an effort to see how exactly the divided worlds of the play are connected.  With a such an array of vibrant performances the play is as rib-tickling as brain-tickling – a combination of virtues that few contemporary playwrights command.  Let’s hope the success of Arcadia leads the Festival to explore Stoppard’s work further such as plays actually set within Shaw’s lifetime, such as Travesties (1974), The Invention of Love (1997) or even the massive trilogy, The Coast of Utopia (2002).

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (top) Gray Powell, Sanjay Talwar, Nicole Underhay, Andrew Bunker and Kate Besworth; (middle) Patrick McManus and Diana Donnelly.  ©2013 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.