7 August 2009: Stoppard, Arcadia
New Century Theatre, Theatre 14, Smith College. Directed by Sam Rush
I often think this is Tom Stoppard’s best play. I’m especially convinced of this after having just seen another production of it. This is, I think, either the third or the fourth. It triumphed in a brilliant production seen several years ago at the National Theatre in London. The current production, by New Century Theatre, has a very nice set fitted to a relatively small stage, very shabby costumes, some very fine, high-spirited acting, a few cases of poor casting, and a running time probably somewhat longer than British productions would take, since Americans even when speaking with British accents tend to speak more slowly than do Brits. Allowing for such regional variations, and what must have been a minuscule budget for costumes, the brilliance and depth of the play nonetheless shone through.
My companion observed that, with every production of this play, some one or two compelling aspects get emphasis; this ends up conferring a certain novelty and charm on what is already, to our minds, a timeless play. In his curtain speech before the play started, Sam Rush mentioned that there is a revival playing in London at the moment which features in the role of Valentine Stoppard’s own son. This added some more charming if incidental depth to our constant feeling about this play, namely, that it has a circular vision as well as a circular structure and that things in the play, as in life itself, have a way of coming around again.
One of the things that appears to have been intentionally foregrounded in Rush’s production is the phrase read out by Thomasina: “Et in Arcadia ego.” The phrase gives title to Stoppard’s play and is at the same time a kind of dramaturgical memento mori. One of the things the play is about is mortality, and Thomasina, coached by her tutor Septimus, correctly translates it as “Even in Arcadia there am I.” To call the play Arcadia is therefore a kind of moral and at the same time comic conceit: it is Death who, in Vergil’s Aeneid, speaks the phrase in question; and yet to say that the play, so far as its title can convey meaning, is about an Arcadia-like place, rural, peaceful, and idyllic, is to lead its audience somewhat astray, sending it, as it turns out, on something of a fool’s errand. That is, we are led to think that Sedley Park, the stately home that is the scene of the play, is just that sort of place, an escape from cares, from justice perhaps, or at any rate from the sordid world at large. Ironically, it turns out that Sedley Park, standing in for Arcadia itself, is a true epitome of an idyllic place inhabited by inevitable death, and no escape at all.
Emphasis on this point occurs before the first act is over. By this time, if we’ve been paying attention, we have seen the play moving in this direction, even as Thomasina begins to make discoveries about mathematical iteration and heat transfer that mark her as an in