Stoppard brilliance as Arcadia triumphs

Reporter: Paul Genty
Date published: 27 September 2010


ARCADIA, (Lowry, Salford)

TOM Stoppard is one those playwrights you imagine going round constantly hugging himself with the sheer pleasure of being him.

And he would have good reason: plays like this, written over 15 years ago, are at the very peak of the modern playwright’s art.

Smart, elegant and frequently hilarious, Arcadia follows not one but two linear stories 150 years apart, set in the same room of the same Derbyshire stately home.

It expertly mixes characters and props from the modern and period house, sometimes in the same scene, has the wit of Wilde and the mystery of Sherlock Holmes, throws in Newtonian physics and mathematical biology and has the same wonderfully understated juxtapositions of real and fictitious ideas and events — mostly delivered with great lightness and comedy as his other popular masterpiece, “Shakespeare in Love”.

Stoppard casually sends modern-day academics up foolish blind alleys by revealing what really went on at Sidley Park in 1809; shows that Lord Byron was a fairly casual and accidental bystander in events at the house — rather than the main man all the evidence “proves” he was . . . and how a 17-year-old girl genius was cruelly cut short by a fire after proposing the entropy of the universe and mapping biology with mathematics, years before these principles were set out by the likes of Newton.

To try to explain the story further would take too long and leave you no wiser.

Stoppard achieves all this quite effortlessly, tossing in a lady of the house who speaks in hilarious Wildean epigrams, a hermit who isn’t what he seems, and wonderful red herrings, greedily lapped up by Nightingale, a don more interested in fame and literature than the truth. It’s simply marvellous entertainment.

Library company director Chris Honer marshals some terrific forces, from James Wallace as the oleaginous seeker of Byronic tittle-tattle to the understated Charlie Anson as Hodge, lothario and tutor to young genius Thomasina (Beth Park).

And they are no more fun than Emma Gregory as Lady Croome and Leigh Symonds as a cuckolded, would-be poet, or Alasdair Craig as the modern-day mathematician and Cate Harmer as the more generous academic around whom the play revolves.

Every performer is well-drilled and every performance beautifully honed on a sumptuous, day-room set by Judith Croft.

This Library Company production is the first of several at the Lowry over the next four years, and talk about starting on a high...