Arcadia is just another play you can stage in the same way that the sun is just another thing floating in the sky. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece is a work of burning, ravenous intelligence, and while almost universally acknowledged as his best work, I get why it’s not staged very often.
I think part of the reason is that the late, great Stoppard probably gatekeepered it from half-baked revivals. But it does definitely involve a lot of people talking about maths, and as much as anything else you really need to be able to pull together a cast who can make discussions about the statistical implications of a country estate’s 200 year-old gamekeeping logs really sing.
It’s obviously not a play about gamekeeping logs. It’s a play about the unpredictability of humanity, how we’re defined by our transience, our sex drives, and our desire to understand.
Carrie Cracknell’s revival is not an attempt to radically reconfigure Arcadia and I doubt anyone would be so foolish as to try – it’s an incredibly specific play. She and her team - notably designer Alex Eales - have however leaned nicely into the Old Vic’s current in-the-round configuration. A bit of furniture aside, they've forgone any attempt to make it look like the country estate on which the play is set, which we visit in the early 19th century and again in the present. Instead we’ve got a revolving circular stage and lights that look like a mobile of the stars – a specific allusion to some lines in the text but also a neat encapsulation of the underlying sense of cosmic wonder that underpins it all.
In 1809 we meet Thomasina Coverley, a 13-year-old Ava Lovelace-alike teen math prodigy, and her suave, cynical tutor Septimus Hodge. Major rising star Isis Hainsworth is phenomenal as Thomasina. She’s not just a cocky teen genius who asks Septimus awkward questions about sex. She’s somebody filled with wide-eyed, open-minded wonder at everything, equally enamoured with understanding bell curves and complex algorithmic theories as she is rice pudding and ‘carnal relations’.
In the present, meanwhile, historian Bernard Nightingale – an entertaining, almost Partridge-esque Prasanna Puwanarajah – is trying to use the estate records to piece together tumultuous events that took place almost 200 years ago. His theory is that they all revolved around Lord Byron – who is indeed present at the house in the earlier timeline, but only as a peripheral and indeed unseen figure.
Bernard is not a straw man vehicle for Stoppard to take a pot shot at historians - rather, the disconnect between events as they were and events as they echo through history is part of the playwright’s point. Humanity is defined by its messy randomness and sex-induced behavioural tangents. But in the play’s most famous passage, one widely quoted around Stoppard’s death, Septimus tells Thomasina (in a beautifully light, deft delivery from Seamus Dillane) that ‘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’. And ultimately that’s what this play is about: a shining-eyed, fiercely cerebral, often extremely funny belief in humanity and its halting but inexorable progress.
Hamlet is an imperfect play, which is why it’s also the greatest play ever written - there’s so much you can do to it.
Arcadia is a perfect play, which means there’s a lot less wiggle room for a director to impose themselves. It’s also unforgiving to actors. Cracknell gives it a nice air of intimacy and avoids having her cast speechify Stoppard’s ornate prose. And generally this works: the sections set in the past are sensationally good. The bits in the present could probably have been done with a bit more pep. Puwanarajah is excellent as Bernard, but not everyone can make the facts-and-figuresy dialogue stuff sound captivating and it suffers in comparison from how stacked with talent the 19th century ensemble is.
A couple of quibbles, but this is Arcadia, man. Imagine seeing this thing at its premiere in 1993 – it must have blown people’s heads off. Now it’s part of the firmament, a known quantity, although its sheer uncompromising cleverness and ambition – combined with Very Good Jokes – means it can still surprise. At one point Thomasina postulates that it must be possible to create a formula that could predict everything that will ever happen, even if coming up with that formula is beyond us. Arcadia isn’t that, but there is a feeling that inside its gloriously dense prose lies as close as we’ll ever get to the formula that makes humanity tick.
