Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

Nicholas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego

Dear friends,

Earlier this month Jim, I, and Isobel went to see a fine performance at the Shakespeare Folger Theatre in DC of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. I was by the end so moved and absorbed intellectually, and amused too, that I took down the play from our shelves and read most of it on Thursday (while proctoring an exam). I’ve now written a review of it as a play that seriously critiques the values thought to be encouraged by the romantic movement of the early 19th century.

Central to the play are two couples: first, Septimus Hodge, tutor and remarkable man, poet, scientist, romantic (played in the first London production by Rufus Sewell and this time by Cody Nickell), and Thomasina Coverly, his aristocratic genius-level pupil (played originally by Emma Fielding, and last night, Erin Weaver). Thomasina is Lady Crome’s daughter, and Hodge a brilliant man who needs an income. And analogously (so to speak) popular historical novelist, Hannah Jarvis (played by Felicity Kendall in the first production, here in DC by the quietly effective Holly Twyford) and the professor, Bernard Nightingale (first done by Bil Nighy, and in the DC play by the excellent Eric Hissom). Hannah’s excuse for living in the house & spending time in its landscape is she’s writing a history of gardens; Nightingale is there to ferret out more information and try out his theory on the family that Byron duelled with and murdered Ezra Chater, who was with his promiscuous wife in the house on the same weekend in 1809 that Nightingale has discovered Bryon recorded as having been there.

It’s impossible to do justice to this play in a part of a single blog. Suffice to say it’s about two groups of people, so like a Booker Prize book (whose typical self-reflexivity and literariness it resembled), a historical past-time in embedded in and interwoven with a parallel contemporary time. As usual with costume drama, it was the 1809 group which broke central taboos of life, experienced tragedy. Here Hodge who we learn became a half-mad hermit as a result of what happens in the play, and Thomasina who is burnt to death the night after the play ends, belong. Et in Arcadia Ego.

This group includes some famous and non-famous figures who do not appear, including Byron—who is never seen but said to be out in the house’s vast gardens, indulging in “carnal embraces” with one Mrs Chater and then Lady Crome. We have a butler (Michael Glenn as Jellaby), an absurdly vain cuckold (who actually does not care if his wife has lovers, Cooper d’Ambrose as Ezra Chater), a landscape architect & gardener (Stephen D’Ambroso as Mr Noakes).

The contemporary group is made up of caricatures & sympathetic portrayals of modern intellectual and sensitive types: adult aristocrats, the owners of the estate, the Coverlys: Peter Stray as Valentine, an older male who would marry Hannah if she’d agree; Margo Selbert as Chloe Coverly, who dresses up as Jane Austen at one point and would become a lover of the professor if he’d agree. We have a silent suffering younger brother who flees everyone, Benjamin Schiffbauer as Gus.

The stories are not so much parallel as run alongside one another as the contemporary modern characters try to discover what was the truth of what happened to the earlier ones. The contemporary ones mostly get everything wrong until near the end when Hannah correctly tells the tale of what happened to whom and when. So there is much dramatic irony, and as the two sets of characters alternatively appear, gradually they begin to occupy the stage at one time.

The joy of Arcadia is in the witty and allusive dialogues, the sufficiently believable characters, a satire on modern sleuthing historical scholarship and the corruption of the academy by people who will argue anything as long as it has sex and a “marque” figure in it (reminding me of A. S. Byatt’s Possession). More deeply, the action and characters juxtaposed to one another and discussing math, geology, art, library and record research makes for a play about time, people’s relationship to love, to landscape, to writing and words, to history and “literature”. Stoppard knows how to conjure up beautiful places through simple words: shrubbery, bridge, pavillion, gazebo, lake; and we hear suggestively of countries far off. There is the usual delightful scene in a Stoppard play of some of the characters listening to, watching and interrupting by comments other characters performing: the professor gives an paper with hopelessly extravagant deductions about Byron.

The final scene has Hodge and Thomasina dancing to a candle at night, just before she goes upstairs (as we know as we watch ) to her death, with Hannah dancing in the same space with a lost shy young Coverly Gus.

At the heart of the Arcadia is Stoppard’s reaction to romanticism: he critiques it as an outcome of the secular enlightenment with its valuing of the individual, genius, nature over conformity to a group, religious ties and assurance of metaphysical continuity. Our modern characters are all romantics, caught up in their own obsessions, with the professor standing in for the worst kind of self-indulgence, vanity, destructiveness of other people to gain prestige and fame. A hermit is both an archetypal 18th century and romantic figure (see Isabel Colegate’s A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, Recluses). Alas at ACESC conferences scholars who are themselves so successful and comfortable in social life usually give anti-Rousseauistic papers which more than half-mock the hermit, and the 18th century idealistic urge to sincerity, retirement. Stoppard takes the figure seriously: his main insight is courageously pessimistic, for Hodge turns away from the world he was working so hard to improve in Thomasina and she dies ironically because he was noble enough to refuse to go to bed with her the night she turned 17. But there are signs of hope: a turtle on the table exists in both eras; the later era does find the papers of the earlier one; I take it the discussions of math are to show a figuring forth of a lasting order & harmony in eternity, which we also see in the final dance and in the interweaving of the characters and their beautiful gardens.

This is the third Stoppard play we’ve seen this spring weeks: the last week of April at the Metro stage in north Alexandia (Old Town), we saw the comic poignant one-act gem, Heroes, and a couple of weeks before that at GMU, a remarkable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, all the better for the young actors not having much money for stage distractions.

The Folger also had an intelligently put-together exhibit in its Great Hall about dreams and sleep in the Renaissance. Informative placards accompanied the objects and there were beautiful stills from recent productions of Shakespeare where Shakespeare’s words evoked ideas and images of sleep and dream. Worth going to see.

Ellen