THEATRE: Guy Willoughby
WHAT can one say about a play that tells two interrelated stories, separated by nearly 200 years, that take place simultaneously in the same room? Welcome to the casually unusual world of Tom Stoppard, a world whose oddity comes uneasily to resemble the one you and I live in.
Stoppard has long been interested in the weirder implications of 20th-century science — Jumpers (1972) stars gymnastic philosophers, and the recent Hapgood is a kind of thriller-cum-quantum physics lesson — but here he surpasses himself in ingenuity and inventiveness.
Arcadia (at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre) is at once about academic detection, poetry, gardens, geometry, sex and scandal — and arcane mathematics. At the end of it all you come away half-convinced that having people from different centuries in the same room isn’t odd at all, but a solid mathematical possibility (if there is such a thing as a solid mathematical possibility).
If that all sounds rather daunting as after-dinner entertainment, remember that Stoppard is also the wittiest British playwright around. His mathematics may be faulty, for all I know, but his sense of the stage and its possibilities are in top form. Arcadia is as much as anything a compelling story, an offbeat kind of whodunnit, and abounds in flashes of fun and good humour.
The two stories? Briefly, the first involves a bunch of languid aristocrats and hangers-on back in 1809 at a country house (the Arcadia of the title), involved in a torrid literary-sexual scandal. The maverick Romantic poet, Lord Byron, somewhere features (although we never actually meet him on stage).
Secondly, we meet the descendants of said aristocrats in 1993, plus a pair of academic researchers who are eager to get to the bottom of the mysterious events of 1809. Eventually, characters from both tales criss-cross in the same space, neatly managing not to bump into each other or the furniture in the process.
Roy Sargeant’s production of this tricksy play features a strong, cohesive cast, several of whom have recently returned from England. Paul Spence, not seen here for some years, plays the pivotal role of Septimus Hodge — tutor, libertine, poetry reviewer and Byronic partner-in- crime. He succeeds in being both leery and sharp-witted at once, two necessary qualities in this particular Stoppardian universe.
As a seducer, he keeps the plot boiling; as an intellectual, Jeremy Hodge’s grasp of what his genius pupil is up to with her innocent calculations is crucial. Young Thomasina Coverly (Janine Eser) is engaged in no less than a mathematical plotting of unfolding nature, a quaint quest that looms ever larger in the plot — or plots.
Of the 20th-century cast, Shirley Johnston and Graham Hopkins give wonderful performances as the rival author- and-don team of Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale. They bait, vex and titillate each other like an updated Beatrice and Benedick — or Branaugh and Thompson, if you like. Hopkins is particularly good as the rather repellent career don with one eye on scholarly fame and another on the TV Breakfast Show; Johnston brings a gently quizzical tone to the most layered and complex character in this play.
Roberta Fox, an actress also too long away in London, is a striking, imperious Lady Croom — jealous mother of Thomasina, and sometime admirer of Mr Hodge. Others who offer neatly-observed cameos include Thomas Hall, Peter Holden and Philip Godawa.
There are times when one would have liked director Sargeant to pick up the pace — much Stoppardian dialogue requires crackajack delivery a la Noel Coward, not reverential enunciation — but in general this is an admirably clean, uncluttered reading of a fiendishly complicated script.
The Civic Theatre has done a fine job in assembling a rare collection of talents around a truly remarkable play. And to the gentleman on opening night who lamented that Arcadia has nothing to do with South Africa: wakey- wakey. Fortunately, South Africa now has something to do with the world.