ARCADIA: NOT TOO CLEVER BY HALF

Tom Stoppard is a clever playwrite. His play, Arcadia, now showing at the Royal Alexandria Theatre in Toronto, is a very cleaver play

It is a story set in one location, a luxurious country estate in Britain, but told simultaneously in two different time periods, with several characters and the story covers a wide breadth of topics: Math, art, romanticism, humanism, Byron, Newton, love, madness, calculus, Latin, history and the quest for the perfect English garden

The story follows two groups of characters who occupy Sidley Park, one group in the early 1800's and the other group in our time. All of the characters, or at least the majority of them, could be considered intellectuals and as such they love to talk. And talk. And talk

Well, that is what intellectuals do, talk. And write. And the writing is one of the ways that the two time periods become interconnected. A bad book of poetry, a series of letters illustrating inappropriate dalliances (much like those photo's on Facebook some people come to regret) and a Game Book, whose prosaic recording of who shot what on which day leads one contemporary character to ponder if Lord Byron did something very very bad at Sidley Park

Art is a prominent theme in the play, as is science particularly math. Newton is not an active character in the play but his presence is well felt, especially in the Victorian storyline, where a precocious young woman and her tutor debate the aspect of god in Newtonian science, the perfection of a leaf and how that may or may not be expressed.

Some of the characters disdain science and see it as the anathema of art where others (one of the contemporary characters is a physicist) so the art in science. Love and sex is tangled up in all of it and it tangles the progress of both, while it equally inspires it

Yes, there's a lot going on in this play. It is a play of ideals. And sometimes that can be ... one of the greatest insults when appraising art ... interesting. Being clever can be a very temporal thing, you appreciate it at the moment, even admire it, but it can quickly slip away. For me, it does not always make the best art, particularly in the form of theatre

Arcadia is indeed clever but it is much more than that. One of the things that saves the play from being too  precious are the characters. Thomasina, the teenage savant in the 1800's is particularly striking; precocious, brilliant, stubborn, frustrating, there is a wistfulness about her charcter: A young woman, even one of the upper class who can be exposed to intellectual pursuits but who may never find the opportunity to express them. In the contemporary timeline there is Bernard, the pursuer of Byron and a maddeningly smug intellectual with no patience for science or rational thought and who can find all that he needs in the most subtle turn of phrase.

What really saves Arcadia, and lifts it from an enjoyable intellectual exercise to a completely fulfilling experience is the humour. The play is  just flat out funny. From dry and informed references to science and art, to slapstick physical comedy to not all subtle sexual innuendo, I found myself laughing out loud more times than I can recall

Arcadia is an ensemble piece and all of the actors aquit themselves well. Of particular note are Kate Besworth as Thomasina, Patrick McManus as Bernard and Dianna Donneelly as Hanna, often Bernard's foil and a hunter of her own mysteries

The staging is simple, a single room in the manor house through which all the characters pass, often at the same time, regardless of their own individual time periods. At one point, in the contemporary setting, the characters are holding a costume party and it becomes intentionally muddy about which time we are actually watching unfold

Stoppard wants to talk about a lot of big issues here and he has some penchant things to say about them but he is smart enough to understand that this is a story, not a lecture, and a story needs to be compelling. By showing that his intellectuals are equally capable of fucking up their love lives as they are discussing Newtonian ideals, he keeps us compelled.

Arcadia, not too clever by half, but fully watchable