Arcadia by Tom Stoppard


My reactions to seeing and reading Arcadia by Tom Stoppard


I reread Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard again today. This is one of my favorite plays (although Travesties is still my number one favorite Stoppard play). I saw this in May of 1994 at the Royal National Theatre with Felicity Kendal as Hannah and directed by Trevor Nunn.
Extremely complex as usual he draws on knowledge from widely disparate areas - chaos theory, landscape architecture, Fermat's Theorum, the life of Lord Byron, and puts it all into a story about how no matter how hard we try we can never really understand what happened in the past, but it is the trying that is key the key to life.
The play is set at Sidley Manor, the ancestral home of Lord and Lady Croom, in both the early 19th century and the present day. There are several plot lines - the main one is the discovery of entropy by Thomasina, the daughter of the Crooms and a girl not quite 17. She discovers that the Newtonian universe is not quite right, that because heat is lost in the transaction the math only works in one direction - forward, not backward. She chances on chaos theory, that iterated algorithms can describe nature (she works on a formula for describing the shape of a leaf). When her tutor refuses to go with her to a dance she decides not to go, and it is that night she dies in her room, probably by accident when her candle sets the room on fire (heat that escapes and can never be put back!). Her tutor, Hodge goes mad, becomes a hermit in the new landscape which includes a hermitage and dedicates his life to generating by pencil and paper the thousands of pages of the algorithm that she discovered, but of course, it appeared to everyone at the time to be merely gibberish.
Within that, there is a complicated love plot. Hodge has been discovered having sex with a guest, Mrs Chater, and is called out to a duel by Mr. Chater. Mrs. Chater is also having an affair with the brother of Lady Croom, Captain Brice. Hodge alludes to this affair, and is promptly called by Brice to a duel as well. Before this duel can happen, however (scheduled at 5 am April 11, 1809 - Lord Byron shows up (he is having an affair with Lady Croom). In the middle of the night Lady Croom, on the way to Byron's room, sees Mrs. Chater coming from his room. Outraged, she kicks them all (Byron, Chaters, Captain Brice) out of the house at 4 am - so they are unable to show up for the duels with Hodge. Byron leaves England, the Chaters and Brice go to the West Indies where Mr Chater perishes from a monkey bite after discovering the dahlia.
The third plot line is in the present day. Bernard Nightingale is an unbearably pompous academic - a Byron scholar - who has come to prove that Byron killed Chater in a duel. He finds enough proof to convince him, although of course he is wrong. Hannah, a novelist, is researching the hermit, and eventually does stumble onto the proof that Hodge was the hermit. Chloe, the daughter of the present Lady Croom falls in love with Bernard, and Valentine falls in love with Hannah, but Hannah refuses him. Valentine realizes the import of Thomasina's algorithms because he is a mathemetician.
As odd as this plot sounds, it is presented beautifully, with scenes alternating in the past and present, and all the articles on stage working in both eras (the house and landscape have not changed) Even the turtle stays on stage - Plautus in the 18th century and Lightning in the 20th. One actor appears in both Gus in the 20th and Lord Augustus in the 19th. The main idea is that the universe wants to be deterministic, but the wild card is sexual attraction which cannot be predicted, explained or understood through logic. A truly great play, with sparkling dialogue, strong characters, and ideas that are fully engaging.

Arcadia websites:
Arcadia archive
Chaos, Fractals and Arcadia
Productions of note:
London at the National Theatre
New York at the Vivian Beaumont
Philadelphia at the Wilma
Some reviews of this play can be found at:
The Complete Review not only a good place for intelligent reviews, but the best collection of links on Arcadia
Redsugar's Library
BooksILoved.com

My earlier postings on Stoppard plays:
Voyage
Shipwreck

Posted: Thu - January 29, 2004 at 08:18 PM          

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