ARCADIA

Cast & Production Team
Evening Sandard Review
London Financial Times Review
Daily Telegraph Review
The Guardian Review

CAST:

Thomasina Coverly.......... Lucy Whybrow
Septimus Hodge, her tutor.......... Edward Atterton
Jellaby, a butler.......... Allan Mitchell
Ezra Chater, a poet.......... Derek Hutchinson
Richard Noakes, a landscape architect.......... Timothy Kightley
Lady Croom.......... Julie Legrand
Captain Edward Brice, R.N........... Timothy Bentinck
Hannah Jarvis, an author.......... Joanne Pearce
Chloe Coverly.......... Rachel Fielding
Bernard Nightingale, a don.......... Roger Allam
Gus Coverly.......... Simon Blake or Peter Andrew-Barnes
Valentine Coverly.......... Charles Simpson
Augustus Coverly.......... Simon Blake or Peter Andrew-Barnes

PRODUCTION TEAM:

Director.......... Trevor Nunn
Designer.......... Mark Thompson
Lighting.......... Paul Pyant
Music.......... Jeremy Sams
Dance.......... Jane Gibson
Assistant Director.......... Gemma Bodinetz
Sound Designed By.......... Scott Myers

Back to top


EVENING STANDARD - 5/24/94 Review by Nicholas de Jongh

I really warm to Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. At its 1993 National Theatre premiere I was, at best, coldly admiring. But second sight leaves me enthused and amused, and far less bemused. For in Trevor Nunn's completely recast and superior new production, Arcadia emerges in a new light and sharper focus.

The subject is time, or rather time past, and the infinite difficulty of recapturing, interpreting or understanding it. In Stoppard's dramatic lesson Bernard Nightingale, a late Thirties Eng. Lit. don from. Sussex University, is set in sleuthing opposition to Hannah, a youngish female literary historian, who turns the 19th century into popular books.

The field of action is Sidley Park, a Derbyshire stately home which, in Mark Thompson's seductive design, is conceived as a vast room looking out on rolling countryside. But time does not stand still in this locale, for Stoppard shifts between Sidley Park in time present, inhabited by the well-heeled Coverly family, and 1809, with their forbears in residence.

This familiar theatrical device allows interesting patterns of dramatic irony and satire. The audience is well-placed to appreciate how far-fetched, how preposterous Nightingale's theories are. He arrives, fired up by the discovery of a book from Byron's rediscovered library, which helps convince him the great poet cuckolded and duelled with a verse-maker resident at Sidley. But we have seen the real 1809 picture: the family tutor, sexy young Septimus Hodge, is having his role as lecher and duelist usurped.

Bernard leans closish to caricature, but Roger Allam superbly makes him a smug and self-important refugee from Academe, an eye on the main media chance. He delivers his so-called Byronic findings to Hannah and Valentine Coverly, a young mathematician, with the air of a man accustomed to basking in his own halo. The unromantic Hannah cuts him down to size and causes comic pleasure.

Stoppard contrasts Bernard's attempt to interpret old time with a dash of intimidating mathematical theory; Valentine suggests the brilliant teenage Thomasina, his 1809 forbear, had discovered the equivalent of today's "iterated algorithms", discerning that you can neither interpret the future with confidence nor reclaim it. And in the play's final scene, the figures from 1809 and today are seen united in dance, knowing they must seize and enjoy the hour, since they cannot hold the bright day.

Stoppard's quizzical humanism and wry amusement in the face of our attempt to know our world is now more powerful and poignant. The impressive acting company contribute greatly to this improvement. All the performances now carry emotional and intellectual conviction.

In Trevor Nunn's lucid production, Hannah is now a convincing literary duelist battling against the crapulous conceits of Roger Allam's Bernard - thanks to Joanne Pearce's combination of sexiness and rigour. Edward Atterton's Septimus exudes enigma and Julie Legrand's Lady Croom delights with her outrage and erotic hauteur. And as Thomasina, Lucy Whybrow models excitement and vulnerability. A delight.

Back to top


LONDON FINANCIAL TIMES - 5/26/94 Review by Alastair Macaulay

A Nobel prize winner said on the radio on Monday that he could keep up with all the talk about science and Romanticism in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. I rather pity him. Trying to keep up with Arcadia is for us lesser mortals, impossible, exuberant, and, finally, strangely touching. The play was exciting when new last year at the National Theatre but returning to it, now that it comes to the West End, is even better - just that bit less bewildering but no less tantalising. For our failure to understand everything is part of the beauty of the play.

Arcadia is all about knowledge - about the effort to know things, about the mutations of known things and our ways of knowing them, and about the ultimate unknowability of things. It suspends, shimmering in the air, both knowledge as a human epistemological endeavour and knowledge as an ultimate onto-logical fact. Its wit puts one in mind of Congreve and Wilde, but finally it comes closer to the forsworn, death-clouded scholars of Love's Labour's Lost. It says "Lord! what fools these scholars be", and then, so tenderly, darts on to knowledge of life, death, and sex.

Arcadia commutes between two eras: 1809-1812 and the present day. Lord Byron is forever offstage, much spoken of by characters in both periods. Romantic sincerity and Romantic artifice are all-important; and so is nature - nature as spoilt and reinvented and investigated by successive humans; and so is time.

The play cast its spell with its marvellous original cast last year. This time I admire Trevor Nunn's direction even more because he has kept the play virtually as enchanting with a new and generally inferior cast. I miss some of the first cast dreadfully - we are lucky that Radio 3 has twice broadcast their performance - but I remain captivated. The best news is that the two most touching and complex roles, Thomasina and her young tutor Septimus - are still very well played by talented young actors. Lucy Whybrow has Thomasina's febrile intensity and charming precocity; and Edward Atterton has the smouldering intensity of the young Romantic's mind and emotion.

The worst news is that Thomasina's mother and the revisionist scholar Hannah are acted terribly - busily, over-emphatically, weakly - by Julie Legrand and Joanne Pearce. Roger Allam is a more languid, classy lecturer than was Bill Nighy; Charles Simpson a more affected young aristo than Sam West.

Yet any flaws are minor, for Nunn has elicited pacing so lucid, and pointing so natural, that this astonishingly complex play remains rich in suspense, laughter, and the excitement of thought. Jeremy Sams's music, brilliantly crossing historical periods, is perfect and moving; and so is the beautiful Georgian round room of Mark Thompson's set. In this post-modern work, every rococo embellishment makes its telling contribution.

Back to top


DAILY TELEGRAPH - 5/26/94 Review by Charles Spencer

Garlanded with awards, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia has transferred from the National to the beautifully refurbished Haymarket Theatre.

The play, with its discussion of scientific ideas, and the new mathematics of chaos theory, fractal geometry, iterated algorithms and the second law of thermodynamics, might sound like an insufferable exercise in intellectual one-upmanship. But it is an astonishing tour de force. Has there ever been a play which took more delight in abstract argument?

But science is only part of the story. Arcadia, set in a handsome country house in Derbyshire (a grand classical design by Mark Thompson) and ranging across the chasm between 1809 and the present day, also includes a fascinating discussion about the changing fashions in landscape gardening, and a lively running debate on classicism versus romanticism which vaults effortlessly across the decades.

But Stoppard is the most genial and welcoming of writers. Having done all the work himself, he gives the audience the flattering impression that we are just as clever as he is. He expounds ideas with amazing grace, and succeeds in persuading even an innumerate physics 0-level failure like myself that it is quite possible to grasp ideas on the cutting edge of scientific knowledge.

Best of all, he has managed to present this discussion in the framework of a gripping literary detective story that fizzes with jokes and intellectual joie de vivre. It's a real pleasure to have your mind given such an invigorating workout, marvellous to see a writer swinging such a impressive sledgehammer against the wall that divides art and science.

The scenes set in the present day concern a popular historian, Hannah Jarvis (Joanne Pearce, fine but not quite as touching as Felicity Kendal in the original production), and an unscrupulous, sneering academic, Bernard Nightingale (Roger Allam, in terrific form), who are both conducting research at Sidley Park. Hannah is interested in the hermit who used to inhabit one of the follies in the picturesque garden, Nightingale thinks he is on the verge of discovering why Byron left England so percipitately in 1809.

The audience, however, has direct access to the past, and in alternating scenes we are able to watch just what was going on in 1809 when the Sidley Park garden was being redesigned. In this way Stoppard offers fascinating glimpses of the way the past anticipates the present, and an often hilarious demonstration of how easy it is for the present to misinterpret the past.

But what struck me most forcibly about Arcadia on second viewing is its combination of a supremely elegant dramatic structure with a depth-charge of powerful emotion. The play appeals just as strongly to the heart as to the head.

There is a surging excitement in its demonstration of ideas. But we also come to care about the 13-year-old child prodigy, Thomasina Coverly (a lovely performance from Lucy Whybrow), who foresees some of the great discoveries of modern science, and about her louche and likeable Byronic tutor (the excellent Edward Atterton). Their relationship is observed with tenderness, and when we finally learn what became of them tears prick the eyes. For Stoppard, the realm of the intellect may be a kind of Arcadia, but death lurks there too.

In the haunting final sequence, in which the characters seem to dance to the music of time, this most eloquent of writers holds his tongue, and Trevor Nunn's production achieves an emotional resonance that goes too deep for words.

I have never left a new play more convinced that I'd just witnessed a masterpiece.

Back to top


GUARDIAN - 5/25/94 Review by Michael Billington

Few plays gain more from a second viewing than Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. At the Lyttelton one was swept along by the play's intellectual energy and emotional dynamic. Now it has transferred to the Haymarket with a new cast, one begins to see the work more dearly: as a meditation on mortality and on the unpredictability of human behaviour and the natural world.

From the start of his career, Stoppard has been haunted by the opposition of determinism and free will, order and chaos. Here he seems reconciled both to human transience and what Lear called "the mystery of things". In the 1809 part of the play, tutor Septimus reassures pupil Thomasina, grieving over the burning of the library at Alexandria, that nothing is lost in the cycle of history: "we shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind." We see how that idea pays off in the present day when Thomasina's doodlings on the chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics are being developed by Valentine, her distant kin. But Stoppard's point is that there is a special exhilaration about living in a time when Newtonian determinism is under fire and "when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."

Other ideas crowd in: classicism versus romanticism, historical reality versus academic interpretation. But even if Stoppard is occasionally guilty, like Thomasina, of "doing more than was asked", his fine play is buoyed up by its inquisitive humanism. And Trevor Nunn's production sits better in the more intimate Haymarket.

In the present, Joanne Pearce as the seemingly hard-hearted Hannah, a popular historian reminds us that even Enlightenment values have an emotiona1 base. Equally, Roger Allam as an ego-tripping, fame hungry Sussex academic shows that his soul can still be stirred by great poetry. And, in the past, Edward Atterton as Septimus and Lucy Whybrow as Thomasina, touchingly show how intellectual enquiry is illuminated by romantic attachment. All of which contributes to Stoppard's moving central theme: the way human character echoes the determinedly unpredictable nature of the universe itself.

Back to top