Trouble in Arcadia

But first, two things to look forward to: Diana Wynne Jones has a new book coming out this year: Enchanted Glass. About what? I don’t know, but I’ll buy it and read it and pat it and love it and call it George! Second… uh, well, Andrew Lloyd Webber is producing/composing a sequel to Phantom of the Opera. I feel like this will be an awesome, must-see show in the same way that Snakes on a Plane was an awesome, must-see movie. But perhaps (unfortunately?) with less Samuel L. Jackson.

I’ve often suspected Tom Stoppard is a reader’s playwright, and seeing the Hart House production of Arcadia merely increases my degree of belief in the same. On paper, Stoppard is witty, complex, and full of nuance; on stage, if you’re lucky, he can be all of those things, but more often he’s stilted and awkward, despite multiple funny bits and an occasional hint of something profound.

Or is this just me? Is it just the case that when I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead I hear and see something in my head that’s totally unwarranted by the text? Is it my own fault that I’m disappointed by actual live actors running around in a space so close I could take a running leap and tackle them?

When I read Arcadia, I understood almost all the characters as being witty on purpose, in a sort of Wildean way. None of them strikes me as stupid; it seems to me that the joke is always with them and not against them, even when they’re the butt of it. One can play it either way, of course: when Thomasina asks Septimus what carnal embrace is, it can be the innocent question of a truly naive girl; a truly mischievous question from a not at all naive young woman; or somewhere in between where Thomasina knows the gist of it darn well but is flirting or teasing or curious or all of the above.

Likewise, although I know perfectly well that one can play bits where Stoppard’s characters say something utterly absurd as the same type of joke as one finds with Mrs. Malaprop – one in which the character says something stupid because she actually is stupid, and her stupidity is part of the humour – I always see it as being tinged with irony: a metajoke. When Lady Croom says something absurd, it’s doubly funny because of the stupidity-humour thing and because we get to share in the fact that she’s the sort of character who says stuff like that not because she’s stupid but because she knows it’s funny, too.

Naturally, this is one of the most difficult things in the world to play, especially (in my experience as both actor and theatregoer, anyway) for young actors. Since the words will get a laugh by themselves, it’s hard to learn to add more to them. Sometimes, you don’t want to get every laugh you can. You want to nail the characters and the emotions and make the audience catch its breath.

To be fair, I’m actually not too fond of Arcadia as a script. Sure, it mentions a lot of things I like, such as physics, math, HPS, knowledge, meaning, history. But, to tell the truth, I find it one of Stoppard’s more lecture-y plays; Valentine’s explanation of iterative algorithms is missing some of the deftness and sense of play that makes Guildenstern’s musings on probability such fun to watch.

Also (I’m learning about myself), academics onstage bore me. This, no doubt, is a bad sign considering my most likely future career, but it’s the truth. It’s sort of like the problem I have with scenes involving clever college students: I liked being one in real life, I don’t like watching them in fake life. Maybe part of it is how Arcadia seems to stress all academia’s faults and none of its virtues: there’s some lip-service toward how even though it seems like history and abstruse scientific studies are useless, they’re still important, but it seems more like a rationalization than a reason to me.

Anyhow, I’ve probably stretched the limits of how far even a pseudo-review can go without giving a summary of the plot of the play in question, so here you are: in the early 1800s, a young man, Septimus, tutors Thomasina Croom, daughter to the owners of a country estate. The visit of Septimus’s friend (an unseen Lord Byron), triggers much comedic drama among the Croom family and their guests. Meanwhile (sort of), in the 1980s, contemporary academics try to piece together what happened during Lord Byron’s visit to the Croom estate. Also, everyone talks about physics, history, and philosophy a lot.

Part of the fun of Arcadia is trying to figure out the complex relationship between past and present. Characters comment on this in the form of (dry and simplified) discussions about determinism; certain physical props are used in both scenes; and, near the end of the play, characters from 1800s and 1980s intermingle onstage, one even seeming to exist in both periods simultaneously.

Unfortunately, for me at least, the past scenes are infinitely more interesting than the present ones. No doubt this has something to do with the whole academic thing I mentioned above. The characters in the present aren’t as intriguing as those from the past. At least Septimus is a charming rogue; Bernard Nightingale is just a pompous one. And, really? It’s difficult to care about who gets credit for publishing what when the other plot involves people killing and/or sleeping with each other.

There are funny moments (this is Stoppard), and reflective ones, too (still Stoppard), but they never seem to cut deeper in the poignant way really great humour and ideas do. My heart doesn’t go out to these characters. Why not?

Well… I’ve been avoiding this observation for most of this half-butt-cheeked review, but I can’t honestly leave it out: the actors all try their best, and many of them have great moments, but most simply aren’t up to the text. Hey, Stoppard flummoxes pros with decades of experience; it’s no shame to have trouble with him as a student just starting out. I would have done much worse.

But the fact is, without strong characterization, these people on the page turn into walking lectures and quips. It’s difficult to make Stoppard’s dialogue sound natural, like something you’re actually saying as you think of it rather than something you’re repeating from memory. It seemed to me that a lot of the actors were running the show by rote – with memorized intonation and stage business, and the fact that no one was able to improvise in the final moments (admittedly, highly choreographed ones) to fix an extremely important prop that had gone awry indicates to me that the cast was running the play show by show rather than moment by moment.

If you’re going to see a so-so play, then Arcadia is a great choice: unlike most “enh” theatre, it will at least amuse you and give you something to think about, whether that something is the philosophy it explains or the oversimplification of the same. The set and the props are both brilliant, and the direction and acting are decent. However, if you’re strapped for cash or not in the mood for a show, you’ll find everything a lot more gripping in the script, and that may be more due to Stoppard himself than anyone else.