(reflection on Tom Stoppard, occasioned by seeing a performance of young adults in ARCADIA at Push Push Theater, Decatur, GA)
Reflecting on an excellent college-age student production of Tom Stoppard's ARCADIA, I'm reminded of a comment made in an interview by composer - lyricist Stephen Sondheim: "In the age-old debate between form and substance, substance wins, hands down; but form is more fun." This play has so much content, with more than passing reference to late-eighteenth century literature, early Romantic trends in landscaping, chaos theory, and fractiles. But the fun, and the feeling, lies in the form.
Briefly, the play has one setting, the garden house of a centuries-old British estate. In that location, scenes alternate between life there with a bright young lady and her tutor and his many liaisons with women of the household in the early 1800s, and life there in the 1990s as some academic types dig through their old papers and try to piece together what really happened. Stoppard makes fun of easy targets: pedantic academics who casually discuss Byron, Thackeray, Coleridge as if these were people they knew. In their own minds, the air is rarefied; but we also see how fatuous they are. The academics seem more connected to life in "their period" than to the people around them. At the same time, of course, Stoppard's jokes and story depend on his audience knowing most of what these academics know.
The life circa 1809 is the heart of the play, and we do fall in love with the young lady who seems to intuit mathematical / physical equations that represent cutting edge cosmology in the late 20th century. Her tutor Septimus Hodge is a resourceful and attractive character, unflappable, generally ironic, but genuinely interested in the girl and her insights.
The substance of the play comes to a climax in the 1990s portion of the story, in a confrontation between Bernard the Literature don and Valentine the Math genius, with the woman historian Hannah (in whom both are interested) watching. Valentine has said that all of Bernard's (and Hannah's) research about Lord Byron and his love affairs is merely trivial -- "just personalities." Bernard retorts, "Why does scientific progress matter more than personalities?... Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility." He goes on, "If knowledge isn't self-knowledge, it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you."
What Stoppard says, and demonstrates so convincingly through these polished but real characters, is that the big questions are interesting, the ones on the biggest scale and smallest scale - big bang, or sub-atomic particles -- but it's the unpredictable nature of what happens in between that makes life worth living. Hannah, after the big blow up, makes a comment about faith. She says that she has no problem with God or spirit, but she can't stand the notion of an afterlife: "If we're going to find out everything in the end [I'm quoting from memory].... if all the answers are in the back of the book, what's the point?" What these characters demonstrate as they talk and talk and talk, is the pleasure in finding out through investigation, surmise, and testing hypotheses.
I've seen many Stoppard plays: HOUND, ROSENCRANTZ, TRAVESTIES, JUMPERS, BIRTH OF LOVE, ROUGH CROSSING, THE REAL THING -- and I've read most of the rest. Tenderness is a quality that we don't find often in Stoppard's plays, and it's what he leaves us with in this wonderful play: the image of the tutor teaching his brilliant student to waltz by the light of the candle that will, we know, start the fire that ends her life. This is by far the best play of his that I've seen, and I could stand to see another three different productions.
No comments:
Post a Comment