Arcadia

I sometimes wonder if Tom Stoppard would have turned into such a good playwright if he had gone to university -- or whether he would have written plays at all.  He might well have had all the intellectual curiosity knocked out of him and lost that insatiable hunger for ideas which is one of the ingredients of his writing.  Arcadia is hailed by many people as his greatest play, and I tend to agree.  It comes between the early absurdist 'showoff' comedies and farces and the heavyweight (some would say overweight) plays of ideas such as the Coast of Utopia trilogy and Rock'n'Roll.  That's a very crude attempt to distinguish between early and late Stoppard;  in fact all his plays have common elements such as the delight in verbal play and paradox, the fascination with intellectual challenges, the sense of the absurd, the sense of history and the sensitivity to feeling.

This revival by David Leveaux at the Duke of York's (that's the one with the uncomfortable seats and the poor sightlines at the bottom of St Martin's Lane) has a tip-top cast including Samantha Bond as Hannah and Neil Pearson as Bernard, the two rival authors whose sparring over their research provides the strongest scenes in the play.  They have to be good to compete with the memory of the original cast from 1993 at the National Theatre, when their roles were played by Felicity Kendal and Billy Nighy. Bernard, an ambitious academic, gets on breakfast television with his claim to have discovered that Lord Byron killed a rival poet in a duel, but gets his come-uppance when Hannah finds proof that the supposed victim didn't die at all.  I also liked the 1809 scenes between the precocious schoolgirl Thomasina Coverly (Jessie Cave), her tutor Septimus Hodge (Dan Stevens) and her mother Lady Croom (Nancy Carroll).  The play bounces along at a cracking pace and is extremely funny, but when the modern and the 1809 scenes converge at the end, there is not much feeling of magic.  In Trevor Nunn's original staging, the past and the present merged in a kind of musical epiphany but in this production the end of the play fell rather flat.  Hildegard Bechtler's bare white box set conveyed none of the atmosphere of an aristocratic country house, nor of the gardens beyond, and the musical accompaniment seemed somehow misplaced.  Another design flaw was the big heavy modern table that dominated the set, which seemed well out of period.  The aristocracy's effortless superiority in the face of the bumptious middle classes is another of the play's themes, but here some of the Coverlys also came over as a bit middle class.  The characters on stage argue about whether God is an Etonian or a Newtonian (the current scientific consensus points to the former).  I came to the conclusion that the play is indeed a dazzling modern classic, but its climax requires an exceptional director like Trevor Nunn to make it work.