Arcadia Review – Love, gardening, and Euclidean geometry come together in Tom Stoppard’s cosmic masterpiece | platform

WWhen Tom Stoppard was asked what this play would be about, just as it was making its fast way from London to New York in the 1990s, he called it a drama of romance, mathematics, gardening, landscape and Byron. It doesn’t cover it completely. Arcadia is often seen as his best work, about life, the universe and everything, to borrow a phrase.

It takes place in one room, across time, filled with the 19th century past and a parallel setting in the 1980s. Director Carrie Cracknell points out that these worlds are a hair’s breadth away from any encounter, almost bumping into each other as they go. The film begins with teenage prodigy Thomasina Coverley (Isis Hainsworth) chatting amiably with her teacher Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane). The ping-pong game of their dialogue is amusing but honest. The mysteries of the world that Thomasina seeks to solve through algebraic equations are accompanied by a slow courtship between them and a romance that grows tender, sparkling, and touching.

Their scenes are set alongside the play’s academics in the present, searching for the story of the missing Thomasina and a thread involving the sinister romantic Lord Byron, as well as a little-known 19th-century hermit.

Stoppard, in the same interview, spoke of the sense of a detective story at play in the production of Arcadia and Cracknell’s production has a lovely searching quality, so it feels like a twist on the country house drama with cerebral intrigue and intellectual excitement – ​​even if the story is heading towards a conclusion that never arrives.

There is an off-stage garden that alludes to itself in the room and Byron’s off-stage figure as well, never before seen but often referred to in connection with an unsavory literary review, duel and subsequent disappearance.

Alex Eales’s elegant collection transforms a single room into a galaxy of drooping ellipses and oversized atoms. It is displayed with a barely perceptible rotation, and its movement appears to mimic the Earth’s rotation in miniature. The characters discuss thermodynamics, Euclidean geometry, poetry versus science, leaf algebra, and so on. These ideas shimmer like conceptual holograms, wavering before you, just out of reach. The actors bring even the most ambiguous lines to life with their playful romance.

This is a drama about knowledge and interpretation, where some of its science seems to be beyond your understanding. Rather than frustrating, The Little-Known Languages ​​of Newtonian Physics and Mathematics sparkles with the sensibility of a playwright who presents complex ideas with such excitement, ingenuity, and depth that it doesn’t matter whether you understand them or not.

Or to some extent at least. Everyone here is so intelligent, from the early Thomasina to Stoppard himself, that his abstractness, wit and intensity might make your head hurt.

The current scenario is weaker in its drama and more spontaneous by contrast. “It’s not science, it’s storytelling,” says Septimus, but it doesn’t always seem that way in these scenes. They disrupt the pace of the play, which stalls while the characters talk about ideas about scholarship. The same tender chemistry doesn’t exist in the modern world of academic jousting and courtship either, despite (or perhaps because of) the blunt passes made by scholar Bernard Nightingale (Prasanna Puanaraja) on star academic Hannah Jarvis (Leila Farzad). Worse still are his taunts: “silly bitch” and “silly cow”.

Regardless of this, the production has an inherent vitality and is actively realized. It is like a complex piece of algebra, fascinating in its difficulties, unsolvable to the end.