Theatre in Review: Arcadia (Bedlam/West End Theatre)

	Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Caroline Grogan. Photo: Ashley Garrett

Bedlam's Arcadia is a rarity on two counts, being an Off-Off-Broadway revival of a Tom Stoppard play and a high-concept staging at that. It's a nervy move by the director Eric Tucker -- Stoppard's works aren't all that malleable -- and it reflects the company's approach: At Bedlam, they don't so much put on plays as rough them up, frisking them for actorly opportunities. In certain cases -- a revival of Pygmalion and adaptations of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion -- the results have been too cute by half, the result of straining for invention without a coherent vision. Here, however, Tucker and his company, despite some distinctly oddball choices, seem energized by the sheer number of provocative ideas embedded in the script. Taking on one of the greatest living playwright's masterpieces, they often rise to the challenge.

And what a challenge. Unfolding in two timeframes (1809 and the early 1990s) Arcadia begins as a high comedy centered around a Georgian-era romantic intrigue: Septimus Hodge, a young., Oxford-trained scientist serving as tutor to the alarmingly precocious Thomasina Coverly, has been caught in a romantic embrace with the promiscuous, sexually aggressive wife of Ezra Chater, a deservedly minor poet. Chater wants satisfaction and the ensuing uproar entangles Lady Croom, the brittle, judgmental mistress of the house; Captain Brice, her not entirely innocent brother; and another (and unseen) houseguest, Lord Byron, who happens to be cutting his own romantic swath through the premises. Adding to the family's rattled nerves, the feckless landscape artist Mr. Noakes is in the process of transforming the Palladian grounds and gardens of Sidley Park, the Coverly family estate, into a faux-Gothic ruin, complete with a hermitage, which everyone dismisses as the height of vulgarity.

Nearly two centuries later, Hannah Jarvis, a popular historian -- her biography of Lady Caroline Lamb has landed on the best-seller list -- has come to Sidley Park to unearth the identity of the man who inhabited the hermitage for twenty years, leaving behind a vast, indecipherable collection of writings. Already, a book proposal is forming in her mind: For her, the story of "the Sidley Hermit" is the perfect metaphor for "the nervous breakdown of the Romantic Imagination," set against a background she terms "the Gothic novel expressed in landscape." (She pronounces Noakes' folly as evidence of the era's "decline from thinking to feeling.") To Hannah's bitter distaste, however, she is joined by Bernard Nightingale, a careerist scholar who, on the thinnest of evidence, is bent on spinning a bodice-ripping yarn out of the events of 1809, based on the notion that Byron killed Chater, and then fled England for the Continent.

As it happens, both Hannah and Bernard are pursuing faulty theories, and much of Arcadia's amusement derives from the way they misconstrue the evidence at hand while working to undermine each other. As Hannah rather definitely notes, Bernard's theory, buttressed by what he says is Byron's critical essay on Chater's work, comes with a planet-sized hole: "Nobody would kill a man and then pan his book. I mean, in that order." Then again, she struggles to understand the significance of the Sidley hermit, whose motivations she can only guess at. Their interpretations of the messy truth are either glib or downright incorrect; the past remains another country, to which all passports have been revoked.

This would be more than enough material for most playwrights but, as always, Stoppard takes it a step further, connecting this tale of art, literature, and romance to the laws of physics by introducing the contemporary Coverly descendant Valentine, a student of chaos theory. To his utter unbelief, he finds evidence that Thomasina, aged thirteen, may have discovered the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not through calculations but in a stunning imaginative leap. (As Valentine puts it, "The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself on every level, the snowflake and the snowstorm.") Thus, Arcadia links art and science, arguing that humankind is moving inexorably toward existential darkness, an eventual winding down of heat, light, and energy even as our understanding of history is obscured in the rear-view mirror. And yet, if the future is bleak, fear not; it is the "wanting to know that makes us matter," Hannah insists.

Tucker makes several choices that can fairly be described as head-scratching, the first being to dispense with British accents. I can understand the desire to do away with unnatural artifice, but this decision tends to obliterate the gulf between the past and near present; it also elides the characters' class differences, which play an important role. And, if the nineteenth-century characters are fairly well-dressed, the modern costumes reveal little or nothing about their modern counterparts; basically, the actors appear to have picked out items from their own closets. An overall sense of style, so crucial to Stoppard's theatre, is missing.

Still, such considerations fade with Zuzanna Szadkowski and Elan Zafir spar, engagingly, as the skeptical, celibate Hannah and opportunistic, predatory Benard. There is considerable entertainment to be had when Bernard tries out his Byron lecture to a tough audience of Hannah, Valentine, and Chloe, the most airheaded of the modern Coverlys, and when the tabloids, in thrall to Bernard's theories, start grinding out headlines like "Bonking Byron Shot Poet." And, while both Broadway productions of Arcadia (in 1995 and 2011) were criticized for audibility problems, this cast comes through loud and clear. If they don't always illuminate Stoppard's incandescent wit, the heat of his arguments burns brightly.

Tucker also deploys a staging gambit that initially seems gimmicky but ultimately pays dividends. In Act I, the audience is placed in raked seating facing a semicircular playing area, partly adorned, in John McDermott's set design, with a mural of the Sidley Park landscape. At intermission, everyone is requested to leave the auditorium, taking their possessions. For Act II, the audience takes the stage, with the actors mingling in the Act I seating. It's a daring reverse-angle gambit that works as the play's parallel plot lines begin to converge. The only drawback is the fussy bits of business in which, during important exchanges, props are busily passed around hand-to-hand. We should be listening to the play, not watching actors execute Tinkers-to-Evans-to-Chance maneuvers.

Then again, attending a Bedlam production is less about seeing a play than about actors wrestling with the play, seeking a way to put a company stamp on it. And, if a pronounced undertone of melancholia is sometimes missed, overall, everyone involved seems to respect Arcadia for the modern masterpiece it is. Aside from those already mentioned, Caroline Grogan excels in the supremely difficult role of brilliant-beyond-her-years Thomasina (an echo of Byron's mathematician daughter Ada Lovelace); Lisa Birnbaum nails the contradictions of the exceedingly proper, yet angry, and lustful Lady Croom; and Devin Vega deftly handles two roles, as Augustus, Thomasina's suave scholarly brother, and the withdrawn Gus Coverly, who hasn't spoken since the age of five. (As Septimus, Shaun Taylor-Corbett cuts a fine period figure, but he could lean more into his character's wry sense of humor and burning passion.) Les Dickert's lighting, which collapses the barrier between actors and audience, is also solid.

If this is an imperfect production of a nearly perfect play, it nevertheless strikes plenty of intellectual sparks. If you've never seen Arcadia, you can be captivated by its extraordinary double-helix construction and dazzling ideas. If you're familiar with it, it's a repeat visit that will only yield new insights. The Stoppardian Mind is always an exhilarating place to visit. --David Barbour