Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Entropy, Sex and Rice Pudding in Stoppard's Theatrical Masterpiece
Oct 7, 2007
Arcadia is one of Tom Stoppard’s most famous plays, and combines an intellectual playfulness with considerable emotional impact in production. The unusual staging, in which characters from two different centuries share the same room, drives the play’s investigation of loss, history and the distortions of time.
Stoppard’s Style
Arcadia is written from the very start in Stoppard’s very recognisable style: within the first few pages puns abound, ideas are juggled between speakers, an extended riff is developed on the implications of the term “carnal embrace” and the question “Is God a Newtonian?” is deliberately misheard into “Is God an Etonian?” For those who prefer their dialogue with a greater flavour of realism, or who just aren’t impressed by wordplay around sex and metaphysics, passages like this can seem too clever by half.
Underneath the dazzle, however, Stoppard is setting up questions that the play will delve into – questions about how we impose our own ideas on the past, how our lives are ordered, and how sexual attraction can interfere with that apparent order. It also takes a writer like Stoppard to bring the concept of entropy down to the fact that jam spreads out if you stir it into rice pudding, but it doesn’t join up again if you stir it the other way. Stoppard’s fans would argue that it is in images like this that he allows us to feel about ideas, rather than simply think them.
Time Traveling
The staging of the play switches from the eighteenth century to the modern day, though it all takes place in the same room in a stately home. Props, such as a book of poetry and some secret notes, continue to exist in both times – they are read and used to conduct intrigues in the past, then discovered and used again, to build hypotheses and arguments, in the present. On occasion the characters from both time periods share the room, even share the same table – as so often with Stoppard, it sounds mechanical and meretricious when planned out, but has a powerful emotion pull in production.
As the modern scholars reconstruct past events completely erroneously from the surviving documents, they reach around the characters they are misunderstanding, whose story is just as immediate to the audience. Next to the effect of this staging, the two speeches, one by the 18th-century tutor Septimus Hodge, the other by modern mathematician Valentine Coverly, seem a little clumsy as they try to explain their sense of history. Though both are eloquent men, it is left to the action and the juxtaposition of the stories they are caught in to bring home to the audience what time means.
