|
Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia has rightfully garnered plaudits since its first performance in 1993 and is now recognised as a modern classic. I remember well the previous Tower production
of the play only six years later. Peta Barker's new production at the Bridewell certainly did justice to this wonderful play. One of my maxims over the years is that, in order to be
successful, a play needs to either make you laugh, make you cry or make you think. This production managed to do all three (all right, not a lot of crying, but the red light on the
stage after the final dance was all too reminiscent of the fire that consumed Thomasina).
You expect cleverness in writing with Stoppard, but in Arcadia he excels himself. The juxtaposition of events occurring in the early years of the nineteenth century with those
taking place in the present day could have appeared clumsy in less skilful hands but in this play we jumped effortlessly from one to the other until towards the end the past and
present collided. This was most cleverly achieved by Aron von Andrian's shift from the mute Gus Coverley in the present day, dressed in Regency fashion for the party, to his near
namesake, Augustus Coverley, in 1812.
The costumes, in the capable hands of Sheila Burbidge, David Taylor and Lynda Twidale were brilliantly-fashioned to give us a true picture of Regency England.
It is, of course, Stoppard's in-joke that props on the set remain on stage, and are added to, regardless of period. It was only some way into the play before I realised that the
laptop was around in 1810 and that the Georgian tea service was still in use today. The tortoise, too, remained a constant feature (well they do live a long time). The downside of the joke,
however, is that the set does require a very long table, and tables do tend to dominate sets. The result was that the acting area was bisected by the table, and possibly too much action occurred upstage.
The set by Rob Hebblethwaite was one of the tallest that I've seen on the Bridewell stage, and certainly evoked a very high-ceilinged drawing room. I was less taken by the cyc behind the windows
and felt that maybe more could have been achieved to suggest the wonderful garden beyond. But I'm no set designer, so who am I to say.
As an actor and director I could find little to fault in either the performances or the direction. With a cast of twelve it would be invidious to praise some individuals over others.
The dialogue was delivered crisply and clearly, at a cracking pace and with excellent comic timing where necessary. The cast was a mixture of old hands (if they don't mind me saying that) -
Dom Ward as the tutor Septimus Hodge, Richard Brent as the would-be poet and cuckold Ezra Chater, Allan Hart as Captain Brice, Helena Cashmore as the writer Hannah Jarvis, Matthew Vickers as the
academic Bernard Nightingale and Landé Belo as the butler Jellaby; newish members Heather Dalton as the Countess of Croom, Aron von Andrian as both Augustus and Gus Coverley and Paul
Willcocks as his elder brother Valentine (should he not have had a courtesy title as eldest son?); and finally new members in Sarah McCarthy as teenage maths genius Thomasina, David Miller
as the landscape gardener Noakes and Sarah Assaf as Chloë Coverley, sister of Valentine and Gus. There were excellent performances all round from the ensemble cast and it was
interesting to see a play where every actor had a good meaty role to play with. You could sense that they were enjoying the production as much as the audience.
The play works on a number of levels and Stoppard is brilliant in the way that the plot slowly seeps out. While Ms Jarvis and Nightingale, with their mutual distaste for each other
get sidetracked in search of the mysterious hermit who lived in Mr Noakes' grotto, and for the proof that Lord Byron killed a man in a duel at Sidley Park before fleeing to Europe, the nineteenth
century characters show what really happened and why. But was there really a hermit, as described by Thomas Love Peacock, and was it really Hodge whose ages corresponded, or was the hermit
merely a sketch by Thomasina on an impression of how the garden might look when completed? We never knew. Every scene added a further layer to the mystery as we discovered that Byron was there
at the time, as recorded in the Game Book, but didn't kill Chater who was indeed bitten by a monkey in British-occupied Martinique, possibly intentionally as Brice wanted to get off with his
ever-willing wife.
I have rarely witnessed such a superbly constructed play, and while the science as propounded by the precocious Thomasina sometimes left me gasping for breath - it was never my strong point -
I shall never look at a rice pudding in quite the same way again.
In short a cracking end to the season.
Photography by Robert Piwko
|
