ARCADIA. To 18 October.
Pitlochry.
ARCADIA
by Tom Stoppard.
Pitlochry Festival Theatre In rep to 18 October 2008.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat 24 Sept, 11 Oct 2pm.
Runs 2hr 55min One interval.
TICKETS: 01796 484626.
www.pitlochry.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 August.
Probably Stoppard’s finest play to date, and possibly one of the best of its age, in a sympathetic Pitlochry production.
What did they know then, and what do we know now about then? Tom Stoppard moves between 1809 and the present in this 1993 play. He shows, as Michael Frayn would in Copenhagen, how it’s possible to discuss scientific concepts, creating sufficient understanding to express essential human concerns.
It’s often brilliantly comic, as so often with Stoppard, but also infused, and enthused, by strong human feeling, most obviously in Thomasina Coverley, the highly intelligent daughter at Derbyshire mansion Sidley Park in the 1800s. Her intellectual explorations have an innocence, from the first line on, and a penetrating originality taking her beyond her idle-minded, philandering tutor Septimus.
Interspersed with these scenes, which also consider shifts in aesthetic taste through landscaping, is a modern story where rival historians recreate what happened – or didn’t – in Thomasina’s day. Eventually the ages mingle in a kind of waltz to the music of time.
Stoppard throws in information about the earlier characters’ fates at various points, almost all unpredictable, in one case devastatingly so. Like the characters, sometimes we know what’s going on, sometimes we think we can guess; at others we’re struck by revelations. In the age-old attempt to find a pattern into which the world can be fitted, both laws of nature and the wildcard of human nature provide upsets.
Pitlochry’s revival is almost very good. Director Richard Baron shouldn’t have provided Jonathan Coote’s show-off academic Bernard Nightingale with such a bright, frilly shirt, nor the moments of self-conscious display. John Hodgkinson, in a Birmingham/Bristol production, caught the style perfectly, as Sarah Stanley, playing Nightingale’s non—academic rival is precisely right here, flopping around the room in casual clothes, urgent when appropriate, alternating between indignation at, and patient tolerance of, Bernard’s exhibitionism.
Helen Millar hardly seems 16 but shows Thomasina’s sense of youthful fun amid the excitement of discovery. Dougal Lee’s servant suggests his views on things within a self-assured polite demeanour, and Joel Sams contrasts the silent and quietly studious youths from the play’s two ages. A halfway good Arcadia is too good to miss, and this is more than merely halfway good.
Thomasina Coverley: Helen Millar.
Septimus Hodge: Grant O’Rourke.
Jellaby: Dougal Lee.
Ezra Chater: Richard Stemp.
Richard Noakes: Robin Harvey Edwards.
Lady Croom: Jacqueline Dutoit.
Captain Brice RN: Greg Powrie.
Hannah Jarvis: Sarah Stanley.
Chloe Coverley: Esther McAuley.
Bernard Nightingale: Jonathan Coote.
Valentine Coverley: Christian Edwards.
Augustus/Gus: Joel Sams.
Director: Richard Baron.
Designer/Costume: Adrian Rees.
Lighting: Ace McCarron.
Music: John Scrimger.
Choreographer: Chris Wilson.
2008-09-04 01:51:10