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AUGUST 8, 2013

Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” at TwentyBY BRAD LEITHAUSER

This year is the twentieth anniversary of TomStoppard’s amazing play “Arcadia,” which opened atLondon’s Royal National Theatre. Actually, it seemsironic and maybe even a little trifling to attach datesto a play in which time is so supple and elusive amedium. The scenes in “Arcadia” alternate betweenthe present day and the early nineteenth century. Thesizable wall of years separating the two becomes, asthe play progresses, increasingly permeable. “Arcadia” concludes with two pairs of dancersonstage, one of them contemporary and one belonging to the era of Byron and Keats.The four waltzers are united by the strains of a single melody.

The play is, then, a sort of Dance to the Music of Time, inevitably calling up AnthonyPowell’s twelve-volume novel of that name. But on my most recent trip to “Arcadia”—aterrific production at the Shaw Festival, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario—I keptsensing a closer kinship with something lighter and far briefer: Irving Berlin’s beautifulsong “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” (I’d like to think Stoppard would approve of theassociation. Popular music occupies a central place in his oeuvre.) Berlin’s ballad wasintroduced by Fred Astaire in “Follow the Fleet” (1936), and it’s a little masterpiece oflight-footed gravity—exactly weighted to Astaire’s buoyant genius. Like a number ofseemingly bright and affirmative Berlin songs (“Blue Skies,” “How Deep Is the Ocean”),it trails a lengthening shadow of melancholy. (Let’s dance, the song urges, “before thefiddlers have fled / before they ask us to pay the bill.”) A similar darkness gathers over“Arcadia,” which in its first couple of scenes might be mistaken for a straight-up comedyor even a farce.

The contemporary scenes are largely a sendup of academia and literary scholarship, aspersonified by one of its gruesomer manifestations—the critic who claims a sort ofcondescending proprietorship over those poor wayward artists whom his judgmentsostensibly serve. We’re introduced to an ambitious Byron scholar, Bernard Nightingale,who is seeking in effect to excavate those nineteenth-century scenes which we in theaudience watch in alternation with those in which he himself so aggressively holds thestage. All scenes unfold at Sidley Park, a country house in Derbyshire in which varioushistorical documents have been haphazardly gathered over the centuries. It dawns onNightingale that Byron may once have visited the house. Initially, the trail is faint. Butour nightingale is in fact a bloodhound. He’s a little scary as he begins to make shrewd,

accurate deductions about the past. And he’s scarier still as, inflated with a vaunting self-

accurate deductions about the past. And he’s scarier still as, inflated with a vaunting self-regard, he goes disastrously astray. The play presents a sly sermon on the unknowabilityof the past, the deceptive pathways down which offhand gestures, casual feints and jestsmay lead the historian decades or centuries later. No one onstage has anything like aclearheaded vision of the knotty interconnections that bind the cast together. The onlyones who are seeing lucidly are those perched in the outer darkness of the audience.

And what they’re seeing is a masterpiece. This is perhaps the place to say that I feelirrationally, impossibly confident that “Arcadia” is the finest play written in my lifetime. (Ineedn’t put it up against “Waiting for Godot,” since Beckett’s pair of immortal trampsbegan standing watch a couple of months before I was born, in 1953.) I’ve now seen fiveperformances of the play, under widely varying circumstances, and I’m confident, as I say,that Sidley Park is a permanent fixture in the rolling landscape of English theatre. Isuppose back in 1933 (twenty years after its curtain went up) you might similarly haveguessed that Shaw’s “Pygmalion” belonged to the canon. Or have predicted in 1915 (dittothe twenty years) that “The Importance of Being Earnest” was a keeper.

One sign of “Arcadia”’s greatness is how assuredly it blends its disparate chemicals,creating a compound of most peculiar properties. The play’s ingredients include sexualjealousy and poetasters and the gothic school of landscape gardening and duelling andchaos theory and botany and the perennial war between Classical and Romanticaesthetics and the maturing of mathematical prodigies. I’ve been emphasizing the play’slightness and humor; it contains an extraordinarily rich concentration of wordplay andloopy misunderstandings, while trafficking in those staples of farce, silly costumes andmistaken identities. But a critic might with equal accuracy point out that this is a play—improbable as it sounds—suffused with the dark implications, the irreversibleenervations, of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

“Arcadia”’s cast offers one tragic, truly heartbreaking character, Thomasina Coverly, whois thirteen when the action opens and speaks the first words in the play. She is drawnwith quick, powerfully delicate strokes, as when she says to her tutor, “Septimus, if thereis an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell,and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” She’s apparently based on a historical character, AdaLovelace (1815-52), who with Charles Babbage explored the consequences of computingmachines before the birth of computers and who has been described as the world’s firstprogrammer. But, while Lovelace’s tale is one of eventual fruition and recognition, theteen-age Thomasina is fated for a permanent eclipse. The last moments we see of her aresome of the last moments of her life. We view her bearing aloft the candle that will, onthe eve of her seventeenth birthday, set her bedroom afire and incinerate her.

Shortly before her death, although she doesn’t fully have the math to validate hersuspicions, she teases out the chaotic implications of the then unformulated Second Law—or, as she puts it, the notion that with a steam engine, however ingeniously it is

improved, you “can never get out of it what you put in. It repays eleven pence in the

improved, you “can never get out of it what you put in. It repays eleven pence in theshilling at most.” She is both symbol and forerunner of a range of modernmathematicians (Cantor, Einstein, Heisenberg, Gödel) whose discoveries have displacedcertainties and unsettled a lay populace that knows enough to know that the rug keepsgetting pulled out from under them. Or, as one of the contemporary characters—amathematician and a distant relative of Thomasina—neatly puts it, “The heat goes intothe mix… And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly .… till there’sno time left. That’s what time means.”

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, with its entropic vision of a running-downuniverse aeons and aeons hence, may seem an impossibly remote prospect for a literarysensibility to focus on productively. But Stoppard isn’t the first English genius to ransackit for lasting inspiration. H. G. Wells was haunted by its adumbrations of an inescapabledoom, and his masterpiece, “The Time Machine,” can be viewed as a psychologicalconfrontation with impossibly remote but still potent fears. His Time Traveller firstventures less than a million years into the future, to a garden world of perpetual blossom.But, before returning home again, he launches himself many millions of years into thefuture, to stand on the edge of a lifeless, cooling world whose blossoms have turned intosnowflakes.

A symbol of lost brilliance, Thomasina is herself obsessed with lost brilliance. In an earlyscene whose full pathos clarifies only in the play’s final moments, she and Septimus havea gorgeous exchange about the burning of the great library of Alexandria by Romansoldiers:

Thomasina: Oh Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of theAthenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library…

Septimus: We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everythingin their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. Theprocession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there isnothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it .… Ancient cures fordiseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsedand lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that ifall of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we wouldbe at a loss for a corkscrew?

For much of the play, Septimus represents a canny, circumspect, and down-to-earthsensibility. But here he sounds like a bit of a mystic (“nothing can be lost”), and the play’svaledictory waltz sweeps us into a crescendo of mysticism. “Arcadia” ’s concluding wordsare spoken by an unmarried modern scholar who makes something of a point of herinability or unwillingness to dance. Her final line is a fumbled, utterly English apology:

“Oh, dear, I don’t really…” She balks, but in the end she dances, clumsily, to the same

“Oh, dear, I don’t really…” She balks, but in the end she dances, clumsily, to the samemusic to which Thomasina and Septimus dance fluently. Time has stopped, or it is everyhour simultaneously. Meanwhile—“Arcadia” tells us—the ashes of Alexandria arerestored to legibility.

Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His collection of new andselected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” was published earlier this year. He is a frequentcontributor to Page-Turner(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/brad_leithauser/search?contributorName=Brad%20Leithauser).

Above: Tom Stoppard in Rome. Photograph by Tania/A3/Contrasto/Redux.

BRAD LEITHAUSER 

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