When English Touring Theatre conducted a poll of the nation’s favourite plays, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia came in an impressive fourth behind The History Boys, Noises Off and Hamlet. But while it seems right that the company should revive it, Blanche McIntyre’s perfectly good production needs a few more performances to get the full measure of Stoppard’s rich text.
The play is a dazzling construct juxtaposing scenes from the early 19th century and the present in a Derbyshire manor house. Instantly Stoppard belies the idea that time cannot go backwards and movingly shows how small choices have fateful consequences: if the precociously brilliant Thomasina had not gone unnattended to bed on the eve of her 17th birthday in 1812, she would have lived to be seen as a mathematical pioneer. But Stoppard also wittily demonstrates how we misinterpret the past, as a modern academic, Bernard Nightingale, rashly concludes that Byron killed a minor poet in a duel in the manor-house park.
Seeing the play again, it struck me that Stoppard slightly overeggs Nightingale’s credulity; nor can I quite believe that his detective work would be hot news in the red tops or on breakfast TV. But interestingly, McIntyre’s production is at its best in showing how we misread the past.
Robert Cavanah as Nightingale offers a biliously funny portrait of academic arrogance and conceit that views scholarly research as a form of oneupmanship. He is perfectly partnered by Flora Montgomery, who lends Hannah, a supposed rival, both a wry scepticism and a genuine hunger for knowledge that leads her to say, in the play’s most resonant line, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”
McIntyre’s understandable decision to cast young actors in key roles, however, yields mixed dividends. Wilf Scolding is excellent as Thomasina’s tutor, Septimus, suggesting a mix of pastoral care and calculating, quasi-Byronic lust. But Dakota Blue Richards, while conveying Thomasina’s intellectual curiosity, has a tendency to drop her voice at the end of crucial sentences and Ed McArthur as the present-day Valentine could also deliver his explanation of iterated algorithms with rather more clarity and force.
McIntyre’s production captures the genuine emotion in Stoppard’s text but needs to do more to help the audience understand the mathematical data and scientific theories. But this is nothing that can’t be rectified and I suspect that, once it has run in, the production will do full justice to a play that charms, instructs and delights in equal measure.
• Until 7 February. Box office: 0844 871 7650. Venue: Theatre Royal, Brighton. On tour until 18 April.
