This splendid revival of Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece is definitely one of this year’s must-see productions. Intellectually demanding yet fizzing with wit, the play is brought vividly to life by a uniformly outstanding ensemble. Seamus Dillane is superb as the rakish tutor Septimus Hodge, delivering a performance of effortless charm and sly intelligence, while Matthew Steer is irresistibly funny as the mock poet/scientist and hapless cuckold Ezra Chater. Isis Hainsworth is luminous as the prodigy Thomasina, blending youthful grace with startling intellectual authority, and Fiona Button is deliciously bold as her mother, the gloriously predatory Lady Croom. Set in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Arcadia explores how we confront death and search for meaning in our lives. Its title suggests Poussin's pastoral painting with the tombstone in its foreground, et in Arcadia ego. Faced with this existential problem, the play suggests two possible routes to understanding: science and art. Science is embodied by Thomasina, a brilliant young mathematician who anticipates chaos theory and fractal geometry, only ironically to die before her work can be completed, and by her twentieth-century descendant Valentine Coverley. Art, in the earlier period, is represented by the poet Byron, present only through his words, and later by Hugo Coverley, the family’s silent musician. Unlike science, art resists definition or elucidation, however energetically scholarship attempts to pin it down. As so often, Stoppard gleefully skewers the vanity of the critical industry through the figures of Bernard Nightingale, exuberantly played by Prasanna Puwanrajah, and Hannah Jarvis, delivered with cool, incisive precision by Leila Farsad. Yet it is art, in its reflection of the rhythms and movements of life, that ultimately seems the most accessible way of approaching the unknowable. The play concludes with characters from both eras dancing together, the one form of expression in which art and artist become one, echoing Yeats’s famous line, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Arcadia is a dense and challenging work, but this production succeeds admirably in making Stoppard’s intricate ideas intelligible and, more importantly, emotionally resonant. It fully meets his lofty expectations of what art can achieve.
Rated: ★★★★★
Reviewed by J.C.
Photo by Manuel Harlan
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