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Arcadia - Duke of Yorks Theatre |
Unravelling this brainy farce is quite a science
ARCADIA
Duke of Yorks Theatre
If ever there was a big beast of theatre, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is surely it.
Its scope, depth and breadth have left critics catatonic, unable to put pen to paper because they’re too busy cursing and praising Stoppard’s ruddy enormous and frankly frightening grey matter in equal measure to explain what the hell is going on.
So here goes. Set in a country house, Sidley Park, the action jumps between its early 19th-century occupants – a landed household including the precocious science obsessed daughter Thomasina (Jessie Cave in her West End début) and her oversexed tutor Septimus Hodge (Dan Stevens), and two present day academics, chauvinistic English Don Bernard Nightingale (Neil Pearson) and his acerbic ivory-towered nemesis Hannah Jarvis (Samantha Bond).
While trying to piece together the house’s history – who lived in the hermitage and the meaning of the pages of impenetrable calculations among other mysteries – Nightingale discovers a letter which he thinks has led him to the literary discovery of the century: that the poet Lord Byron fled England following a murderous love duel at the house.
He spends the rest of the play trying to pin him for a murder that never happened. As the farce unravels by way of landscape gardening, rice pudding, the romantic ideal, Euclidean geometry and Newtonian thermodynamics, it becomes clear that the plot is incidental and a much bigger hoodwinking is in progress.
Arcadia isn’t about the age-old clash of ideas of science and nature, reason and chaos, possibility and determinism but the quest for knowledge – the very thing that makes us human. As Jarvis puts it in probably the play’s most crucial speech: “It’s all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”
Bravo bravo. But enough mental gymnastics...Priscilla Queen of the Desert next time please.
Until September 12
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