The play is Arcadia, Tom Stoppard's 1993 romp through landscape architecture, mathematics, love, comedy and drama. Yes, it's all in there. Delivered with sparkling wit and rapid-fire repartee that pushes your brain through a proper workout, while delighting it at the same time.
There's no denying that you have to be a bit of an intellectual to appreciate Stoppard. Certainly a great many of the jokes in Arcadia fall flat without some grasp of garden history, the life of Byron, algebra and chaos theory. The more you know to start, the more amazed you'll be by the way Stoppard has wound all his clever threads together. I'm rock solid on the first two topics, flunked the third in ninth grade and have only a dim comprehension of the last.
The beauty of Stoppard, with this level of awareness, is that you can pat yourself on the back for knowing about the bits you know, and feel educated by the bits you don't. I loved the wordplay so much I believe I might have comprehended algebra ... or at least understood why the hell I was forced to study it ... if Stoppard had been my teacher. There are a lot of parallels between this work and Shakespeare in Love. That was a fun story, but the more you know about the bard, the more you appreciated the nuances. If you liked the film as much as I did, you'll probably be an Arcadia fan.
Arcadia explores a mystery in an English country house, bouncing back and forth between the present-day academics who are researching the past, and the Regency family living the real story. The two-time period historical mystery has become a bit hackneyed today (seems like every paperback I pick up these days has the same set up), but when Stoppard introduced this play it was still fairly fresh. Much of the humour comes from the audience being one step ahead of the academics; because we are watching the past unfold, we know how they're going wrong, and what fools they may soon make of themselves. Besides telling an amusing story in magnificently clever language, Stoppard gives us devastatingly incisive character sketches. The precocious child growing to adulthood, squabbling academics, the socially awkward English aristocrat, the fawning bourgeois begging for aristocratic favour; all the stereotypes are here, but injected with new depth and truth.
Of course, no matter how good a play, it's only as good as its production. And this one fulfills all the potential of its author's brilliance. The veteran cast presents no superstars, but rather familiar faces with long CVs you've seen in plenty of television and movie productions. (Interesting to note how the Harry Potter series is developing British talent. Two of the young leads are familiar from those films.) I first saw Arcadia in Dallas. I loved it then, but it was only in a production filled with a top quality British cast that I picked up all the nuances of social class. I don't think Americans, without living here for a while, can grasp or adequately present the mannerisms on show here. Much less the accents. I was particularly fond of Ed Stoppard (yes, the author's son ... above left), who did the emotionally stunted English public school boy with a painful believability, and of Dan Stevens' tutor (above centre), who balanced the rapier-like wit and sexual adventuring of the Regency playboy with a poignant underlying sensitivity.Despite the need for fiscal responsibility, am seriously considering getting tickets to see Arcadia again before the end of its run. I am sure that, no matter how much I was drinking in the dialogue, at least 30 per cent of it rushed through my fizzing brain before I could grasp and appreciate it. In the mean time, I'll just pour myself a glass of wine and pop Shakespeare in Love into the DVD player. Either way, my brain will be delighted with the exercise.
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