Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia 9780826496201, 9780826496218, 9781623569082, 9781441187833

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Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

BloomsburyModern ModernTh Theatre eatreGuides Guides Continuum

Continuum er concise, Bloomsbury modern modern theatre theatre guides guides off offer concise, accessible accessible and and informed introductions to the key plays of modern times. Each book is carefully structured to offer a systematic study of the play in its biographical, historical, social and political context, an in-depth study of the text, an overview of the work’s production history including screen adaptations, and practical workshopping exercises. They also include a timeline and suggestions for further reading which highlight key critical approaches. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Peter L. Hays and Kent Nicholson August Wilson’s Fences Ladrica Menson-Furr Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls Alicia Tycer David Mamet’s Oleanna David K. Sauer John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger Aleks Sierz Patrick Marber’s Closer Graham Saunders Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot Mark Taylor-Batty and Juliette Taylor-Batty Sarah Kane’s Blasted Helen Iball Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia John Fleming Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Ken Nielsen

John Fleming

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2008 Reprinted 2011, 2012 © John Fleming 2008 ARCADIA by Tom Stoppard. © Tom Stoppard 1993 Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. John Fleming has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-8264-9620-1 PB: 978-0-8264-9621-8 EPDF: 978-1-4411-8783-3 EPUB: 978-1-4411-6115-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents

Acknowledgements General Preface

vi viii

1

Background and Context

1

2

Analysis and Commentary

28

3

Production History

74

4 Workshopping the Play

86

Timeline Further Reading References Index

104 107 111 117

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the series editors, Steve Barfield, Janelle Reinelt, Graham Saunders and Aleks Sierz for asking me to write this book. I am especially grateful for the detailed, critical feedback that Graham and Aleks provided; their insights improved the final text. My thanks to Tom Stoppard for writing a play that continually stimulates and for his gracious interview conducted in the mid1990s when I was a doctoral student. His candidness informed my understanding of the play both then and now. Likewise, the staff at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, location of the Tom Stoppard archive, were always helpful. All quotations from Arcadia appear via kind permission from Faber and Faber Ltd. and from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. For their thoughtful comments, constructive suggestions and exercise ideas for the ‘Workshopping the Play’ chapter I am indebted to my former colleague at Auburn University Dan LaRocque and my current Texas State University colleague Chuck Ney. Their friendship, as well as professional support, is much appreciated. For more recent research on this specific project I am grateful to my graduate research assistant Richard Wilcox; thank you for always being prompt and finding material on short notice. To my colleagues in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas State University and to Dean Richard Cheatham, thank you for allowing time away from the office to finish this project. For their thoughtfulness, kindness and attention to detail, I deeply appreciate the efforts of Colleen Coalter, Anya Wilson and

Acknowledgements vii

the rest of the staff at Continuum. It has been a pleasure to work with you on this project. As always, my heartfelt love and gratitude go out to my wife Julie Jalil. Thank you for your encouragement and support. John Fleming San Marcos, Texas, December 2007

General Preface BloomsburyModern ModernTheatre TheatreGuides Guides Continuum

Continuum Modern Theatre Guides offer Volumes in the series Bloomsbury concise and informed introductions to the key plays of modern times. Each book takes a close look at one particular play’s dramaturgical qualities and then at its various theatrical manifestations. The books are carefully structured to offer a systematic study of the play in its biographical, historical, social and political context, followed by an in-depth study of the text and a chapter which outlines the work’s production history, examining both the original productions of the play and subsequent major stage interpretations. Where relevant, screen adaptations will also be analysed. There then follows a chapter dedicated to workshopping the play, based on suggested group exercises. Also included are a timeline and suggestions for further reading. Each book covers: z z z z

Background and context Analysis of the play Production history Workshopping exercises

The aim is to provide accessible introductions to modern plays for students in both Theatre/Performance Studies and English, as well as for informed general readers. The series includes up-to-date

General Preface ix

coverage of a broad range of key plays, with summaries of important critical approaches and the intellectual debates that have illuminated the meaning of the work and made a significant contribution to our broader cultural life. They will enable readers to develop their understanding of playwrights and theatre-makers, as well as inspiring them to broaden their studies. The Editors: Steve Barfield, Janelle Reinelt, Graham Saunders and Aleks Sierz March 2008

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1 Background and Context

This chapter provides an introduction to Arcadia (1993) by placing it in context of Tom Stoppard’s canon. It provides a brief biography as well as an overview of Stoppard’s career and his cyclical pattern of creation. It also places Arcadia in context of the recent phenomenon of ‘science plays’. Introduction

Ever since the premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) at the National Theatre, Tom Stoppard has ranked as one of the most significant contemporary playwrights. As a writer of comedies of ideas, he has enjoyed both critical and commercial success. The intelligence, theatricality and linguistic virtuosity of his plays have made Stoppard a favourite of critics. While Stoppard has written for radio, television, film and a variety of theatrical stages, his major plays are the full-length works he has written for the West End, the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Royal Court. Remarkably nine of Stoppard’s eleven major plays have won a Best New Play award in either London or New York. Likewise, Stoppard is the rare writer who can rightly claim that cornerstones of his canon come from five different decades. While Stoppard has numerous award-winning works, many critics cite Arcadia as Stoppard’s finest play. In an interview for the RSC’s 1993 revival of Travesties, Stoppard himself remarked: ‘I think [Arcadia’s] the first time I’ve got both right, the ideas and the plot. I think Arcadia is probably where all that was leading.

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It’s lost the comic songs and the parodies, but it’s a similar combination of larking about and trying to deliver some kind of thesis’ (Spencer, 1993b). Arcadia shows Stoppard at the peak of his creative powers as it melds his early career ( Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974)) stylistic display of an intellectual concept with his midcareer more realistic, narrative style (Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982)). These phases of Stoppard’s career join to create a work that along with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992), were among the most globally most produced plays of the 1990s. With its focus on ‘two unchanging facts of life: sexual attraction and death’, the critic Jim Hunter argues that ‘Arcadia seems the Stoppard play (along perhaps with Rosencrantz) least likely to date, most likely to deserve future revivals’ (Hunter, 2000: 155). Arcadia is also significant because it reflects Stoppard’s worldview, one where there is a high degree of relativity yet also some moral absolutes. Arcadia also helps to dramatize Stoppard’s view of life being comprised of a complex, dynamic interaction of randomness, determinism and metaphysics.

About Tom Stoppard

Stoppard’s path to becoming a major British playwright was circuitous. While his self-identity and established image is as a quintessential Englishman, he is actually of Czech Jewish descent, with his birth name being Tomáš Straüssler. Born on 3 July 1937, Stoppard was the second son of Dr. Eugen Straüssler and his wife Martha Becková. Neither parent had a sense of Jewishness as being essential to their ethnic identity or religious practice, and Stoppard himself did not learn that he was Jewish until 1994. Because of their Jewish roots, the family left Czechoslovakia on the eve of the 1939 Nazi invasion. They went to Singapore, but were again dislocated when the Japanese invaded in 1942. While Mrs. Straüssler and her two sons went to India, Dr. Straüssler remained behind and was killed.

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After the war Mrs. Straüssler married British Army officer Kenneth Stoppard. When the family moved to England in 1946 the children took their stepfather’s surname. The family lived in a number of cities before settling in Bristol in 1950. Though born in Czechoslovakia and not moving to England until he was eight, Stoppard received all of his schooling in English and has never been literate in any other language; as a result he downplays comparisons to novelists such as Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, foreign-born writers known for their mastery of the English language. Likewise, Stoppard embraced his adopted homeland, and through his stepfather and prep schooling, cultivated his sense of Englishness. While Stoppard’s biographer Ira Nadel teases out nuances of Stoppard’s plays that likely have unconscious roots in his personal experience, Stoppard is not an autobiographical writer. While his Czechoslovakian heritage and experiences in India helped spur the interest that led to plays such as Professional Foul (1977) and Indian Ink (1995), they are not about Stoppard or his family. Instead, Stoppard’s plays are rooted in reading and research; his voracious appetite for books and ideas has spurred an eclectic array of dramatic subjects. Though Stoppard is one of the most self-consciously intellectual playwrights, he never went to university, having left school at the age of seventeen after completing his ‘O’ levels. From 1954 to 1960 he lived in Bristol, working as a newspaper reporter. In 1960, Stoppard decided to forsake journalism to pursue a career in playwriting, and in 1962 moved to London. In the seven years between turning to playwriting and the success of Rosencrantz, Stoppard supported himself via freelance work and the writing of reviews. Stoppard’s early stage plays A Walk on the Water (1960) (later revised as Enter a Free Man (1968)), The Critics (1961–1962) (substantially reworked into the very successful The Real Inspector Hound (1968)) and The Gamblers (1965) all showed promise, but are ultimately unremarkable. At the same time, Stoppard published a few short stories and

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wrote a variety of both produced and unproduced television and radio scripts. During this pre-success period Stoppard also wrote his only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966) as well as his awardwinning radio play Albert’s Bridge (1967), with the latter airing after Rosencrantz’s premiere at the National Theatre. Since the success of Rosencrantz, Stoppard has composed a major new play approximately every four years, with the intervening years filled by writing smaller plays, adaptations, works for radio and television, as well as film scripts, a practice he has turned to increasingly since the 1980s. As a writer, Stoppard has frequently followed a cyclical pattern of creation. Typically, he has found an area of interest, thematically or artistically, that he has explored over a number of years, often starting with a minor work and culminating in a major work or works. Once he feels he has sufficiently explored that theme or executed that style he moves on to a newfound interest. Stoppard’s breakthrough work Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead began as a one-act play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear (1964). Revision, expansion and a shift in focus to the existential plight of the title characters led to Ronald Bryden’s lifealtering rave review of the Oxford Theatre Group’s amateur production of the play at the 1966 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The subsequent 1967 National Theatre production made Stoppard internationally known; within its first year Rosencrantz was staged in twenty-three countries and was soon translated into over twenty languages. Harold Hobson’s review of the National Theatre production was prescient as it hailed the play as ‘the most important event in the British professional theatre of the last nine years [since Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party]’ (Hobson, 1967). While John Osborne launched the post-war renaissance in British playwriting, Pinter and Stoppard have been the most internationally lauded British playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century and have each crafted significant and distinctive bodies of work. Partly due to its ties with Hamlet, Rosencrantz seems like the Stoppard play least

Background and Context 5

likely to date, one that stands a good chance of remaining in the repertory long after its author’s death. While Rosencrantz remains the work for which Stoppard is probably most recognized, in terms of its origins and approach, it is the least characteristic. All of the other major plays began with a specific thematic idea or subject that Stoppard wanted to write about; it was then a matter of discovering who the characters were and how to construct the plot. For Rosencrantz Stoppard began with the characters and situation of Hamlet, and then let his themes emerge out of his exploration of the immediate situation faced by the characters. The plot and basic idea of Rosencrantz is relatively simple. Stoppard takes two minor characters that are almost indistinguishable in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and thrusts them into the foreground. For a reason that they either do not know or cannot remember, they have been summoned to Elsinore. Along the way they meet a travelling troupe of Players who appear in Hamlet. At Elsinore, the protagonists participate in episodes of Hamlet and have more encounters with the Players. In the third act, they are on the boat taking Hamlet to England, meet the stowaway Players, and discover two letters – one announcing Hamlet’s death warrant, the other their own. Throughout the play, they wait, talk, philosophize, play games and spend much of the time trying to make sense of their situation and the events transpiring around them. While revising the work, Stoppard realized that a play about Shakespeare’s minor characters could be more than just a joke-filled comedy. Stoppard has remarked: ‘Something alerted me to the serious reverberations of the characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the most expendable people of all time. Their very facelessness makes them dramatic; the fact that they die without ever really understanding why they lived makes them somehow cosmic’ (Sullivan, 1967). Recognizing the metaphoric opportunity their situation represented, Stoppard crafted a play that deals with significant philosophic issues: 1) the nature of truth, 2) role-playing

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versus identity, 3) human mortality and 4) whether life and the universe are random or deterministic, does chance or logic rule the world? On many of the themes Stoppard offers multiple viewpoints without taking a definitive position; indeed, critics have often arrived at antithetical interpretations of the play’s meanings. Overall, Stoppard crafts engaging characters whose bewildered attempts to understand their world gain the audience’s sympathy. In the process Stoppard also established his penchant for writing comedies of ideas, plays that would make audiences laugh while also challenging them intellectually. Rosencrantz is a culmination of Stoppard’s pre-success work. Not only does it revise the ur-text Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, it also ‘perfects’ the style and themes of The Gamblers. Both plays use Beckettian stichomythic wordplay balanced by philosophical monologue, and both examine issues of fate, roleplaying, the nature of identity, theological doubt and the idea that life is a gamble. Rosencrantz’s worldwide success gave Stoppard time to explore new territory. Jumpers and Travesties fall into the second cyclical period. Thematically, Jumpers has its predecessor in the short television play Another Moon Called Earth (1967), while Travesties’ thematic antecedent is the radio play Artist Descending a Staircase (1972). Artistically, Jumpers and Travesties are cut from the same cloth: disorienting prologues, dauntingly long but comic monologues, and a series of scenes that mingle highbrow and lowbrow jokes with unexpected bits of music, dance, parody and the debating of intellectual ideas; in short, both plays have a surface veneer of flashy showmanship and an innovative style that strives to be entertaining, funny and surprising, while also trying to discuss serious ideas. The theatricality and verbal fireworks of these two plays became the trademark Stoppard style. In penning Jumpers Stoppard took advantage of having the full resources of the National Theatre at his disposal. The minimalism of

Background and Context 7

Rosencrantz gives way to the theatricalism of an on-stage troupe of acrobats, a trapeze striptease and the use of film and slide projections. More than just requiring increased theatre resources, the two plays are written from very different personal perspectives. The Stoppard who wrote Rosencrantz was a young man who enjoyed all-night debates and who worried if he would have the money for his next pack of cigarettes. The Stoppard who wrote Jumpers was a married father of two, living in a comfortable suburban home having already earned international acclaim. While Rosencrantz embodies the existential angst of a young, struggling writer faced with life’s uncertainties, Jumpers stems from Stoppard’s reactionary conservative side. While its aim is a refutation of Logical Positivism, the play’s origin stems from Stoppard’s desire to rebut the growing relativism and atheism of the 1960s. Exemplifying the critical divide over Jumpers is the fact that it won Plays and Players Best New Play Award as well as its MostOver-Rated Play Award. The antithetical reactions may stem from Jumpers’ uniqueness as a piece of theatre. Set in a fictitious, indeterminate time after the British have landed on the moon, Jumpers is ‘a farce whose main purpose is to affirm the existence of God. [It is] a farcical defence of transcendent moral values [and] an attack on pragmatic materialism’ (Tynan, 1979: 93). Not only does it use a comic tone to treat serious issues, but its modes of discourse include song and dance, acrobatics, striptease, philosophy lecture, murdermystery detective story and a dream sequence, all of which interact to engage with philosophical questions about the existence of God and the nature of goodness. Jumpers, along with Travesties, epitomizes Stoppard’s attempt to form ‘the perfect marriage between the play of ideas and farce or perhaps even high comedy’ (Hudson, 1974: 59). Though a murdermystery farce with a spectacular surface of glamorous women, songs, acrobatics, film clips and rollicking laughter, the play is

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ultimately aimed at discussing the existence of God and morality. Stoppard told the critic Mel Gussow: I identify emotionally with the more sympathetic character [George] in the play who believes that one’s mode of behaviour has to be judged by absolute standards. At the same time I don’t have to get anyone else to write the other characters for me, because intellectually I can shoot my argument full of holes. This conflict between one’s intellectual and emotional response to questions of morality produce the tension that makes the play. (Gussow, 1995: 14) While Stoppard’s frequent interview comments make clear his theism and belief in some moral absolutes, the play’s dazzling form has led to a wide variety of interpretations, some antithetical to Stoppard’s professed values. Rosencrantz and Jumpers were award-winning successes at the National Theatre, and they earned Stoppard a reputation as a flashy, entertaining, apolitical, intellectual artist. While Travesties would continue to display Stoppard’s linguistic and theatrical virtuosity, it also allowed him to explore his own internal debate over questions such as: What is an artist? What are the possible roles, functions and aims of the artist? What is the position of the artist in society? What is the relationship between revolutionary art and revolutionary politics? In other words, while the 1960s and early 1970s were known for their political activism, Stoppard recognized that he was going against the trend of political art, and Travesties was, in part, an attempt to assess ‘why my plays aren’t political, or ought they to be’ (Hayman, 1982: 7). Travesties consists of the fictional, fractured memories of a minor British consular figure, Henry Carr, and his interaction with novelist James Joyce, Dadaist leader Tristan Tzara and Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin while all four were in Zurich during World War I. Scenes in the first act often correspond to plot points in The

Background and Context 9

Importance of Being Earnest. Stylistically, it is a linguistic tourde-force full of Wildean pastiche, Shavian dialectics, a pun-filled Joycean stream-of-conscious monologue, dadaist poetry, history lesson, limericks, parody, song, epigrams, bi-lingual puns and scenes that continually restart. While entertaining the audience, Stoppard also wanted this comedic first act to have people ‘playing ping-pong with various intellectual arguments’ (Hayman, 1982: 12). Radically different in style and tone, the second act focuses on Lenin and his attempt to return to Russia to join the Revolution as well as his views on art. Virtually all of Lenin and his wife Nadya’s dialogue come from their own writings, and so much of the second act is almost documentary in nature. (In his revisions for the 1993 RSC revival, Stoppard strengthened Act Two by lightening the tone and by more clearly integrating the Lenin section into Carr’s memory and the Earnest framework.) Act Two also continues the debating motif as it includes artistic and political debates between Carr (speaking from Stoppard’s own bourgeois position) and Cecily (speaking as a Lenin disciple). The play’s themes are explored through the frequent debates that occur. In general, Stoppard tries to keep things fairly even handed as, for example, in Act One he gives both the middle-class defender-oftraditional ideals Carr and the class-conscious Tzara valid arguments; however, a close reading shows that Stoppard subtly shows the ways that Tzara (and later Lenin) contradict themselves. Likewise, a careful examination of the overall structure and style of Travesties shows that the play evokes Joyce’s artistic legacy and embodies the Joycean aesthetic of being a very consciously, carefully crafted, multi-layered work of art. The overt expression of Stoppard’s views on art comes in the Act Two debate between Carr and Cecily as Carr is aligned with Stoppard as he offers an affirmation of art-for-art’s sake and in opposition to utilitarian, socio-political art. Likewise, in the political debate, Carr speaks for Stoppard as he critiques Marxism. Notably, in keeping with Stoppard’s personal politics, the 1993 revision

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removes some of Cecily’s stronger, pro-socialist arguments. It is another example of how Stoppard has been at odds with the leftleaning nature of late-twentieth-century British theatre. Its bold theatricality and linguistic daring helped earn Travesties major awards in both London and New York. Stoppard himself has remarked: ‘I’ve always thought Travesties contained things that were actually better than I can write’ (Spencer, 1993b). Similarly, he told the critic Ronald Hayman: ‘Most of Travesties – not as a structure and a play but speech by speech – still seems to me as good as I can ever get’ (Hayman, 1982: 138). Stoppard’s crucial qualification concerns the distinction between individual passages versus the cohesion of the play as a whole. Kenneth Tynan has offered a valid critique: ‘What [Travesties] lacks is the sine qua non of theatre; namely a narrative thrust that impels the characters, whether farcically or tragically or in any intermediate mode, toward a credible state of crisis, anxiety, or desperation’ (Tynan, 1979: 109). The play lacks narrative momentum and any sense of pain or pathos, attributes that are present in Jumpers. On the other hand, the writing embodies the notion of style-for-style’s sake, which in turn affirms Stoppard’s view that artists do not need to justify themselves in political terms. Ironically, after asserting this view, Stoppard proceeded to pen plays that were overtly political, plays that dealt with the ramifications of Lenin’s ideology in action. Between major plays Stoppard remained busy by writing for other mediums, composing adaptations and penning works for nonmainstream theatre venues. Some of these ‘minor’ works include some of Stoppard’s most innovative and effective writing. In particular, in 1977 his concern for human rights abuses in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union manifested itself in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (a work written to be performed with the London Symphony Orchestra), and the award-winning television play Professional Foul. Since these plays directly confront social issues, critics hailed them as marking a new, more mature Stoppard, a playwright who

Background and Context 11

would be serious and politically engaged. Stoppard responded: ‘I was always morally if not politically involved’ (Shulman, 1978). Both works expressed a concern for universal human rights, and on a personal level, Stoppard became politically involved in trying to secure the rights of dissidents in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Stoppard has always embraced a challenge, and while he confined his overtly political works to his non-major plays, he decided it was time to move away from the flashy showmanship of Jumpers and Travesties. His move to modified realism for Night and Day (1978) derived from the practical concerns of writing for the West End and answered the personal artistic challenge of trying to write a narrative drama centred around a complex, female protagonist involved in a love story. The play was also a homage to, and examination of, his first love, journalism. Resembling a Shavian drawing-room comedy, Night and Day is set in a fictional African country on the cusp of a secessionist civil war. Stylistically, Stoppard’s modified realism includes a dream sequence, an expressionistic fantasy, melodramatic plot points, dialectical debates and an aside-like ‘inner voice’ for the female protagonist. Thematically, the play champions freedom of the press while also debating the best way to operate newspapers. In part, Stoppard was responding to the events of 1977 when Britain’s National Union of Journalists were seeking a ‘closed shop’ in which only union members could work for a newspaper. Stoppard’s personal anti-union stance prevents any balanced debate, and Michael Billington has argued: ‘Obviously press freedom is a sacred ideal; obviously the British press is freer than most, but there are daily, visible pressures on that freedom (of the kind David Hare and Howard Brenton subsequently dealt with in Pravda (1985)) that neither [the character Jacob] Milne nor Stoppard acknowledges’ (Billington, 1987: 127). While Night and Day enjoyed a long West End run and won another Evening Standard Best New Play Award, to date it has not

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yet had a major revival. In some ways, its foray into the realm of modified realism and its probing of infidelity served as a trial run for The Real Thing. With The Real Thing Stoppard more fully answered the critics who said he could not write truthfully about the depths of basic human emotions. The title refers to a love affair that is destined to last and to the discrepancy between reality and appearance. While the play also broaches Stoppard’s perception of the ‘real thing’ in art, politics and writing, the play is first and foremost a witty, intelligent romantic comedy focusing on the joys, pains and emotional dynamics of adult relationships. It involves an affair that breaks a marriage as well as a marriage that survives an affair. It is also the rare serious modern marriage play that ends happily. In the process Stoppard presents multiple views on what constitutes fidelity and commitment and what factors go into whether love endures. The Real Thing is Stoppard’s most mainstream work, and it is also his most autobiographical as the parallels between Stoppard and his protagonist, Henry, are numerous. Both are successful, middle-aged playwrights known for erudite comedies but not for heartfelt emotion. Both men have a reverential view of language, and both do works for hire, writing films to pay alimony and to enjoy an upper-class lifestyle. Both ‘steal’ another man’s wife and find happiness in their second marriage. (Stoppard’s twenty-year second marriage ultimately ended in divorce in 1992; ironically, Felicity Kendal, who played Henry’s second wife Annie, was the woman for whom Stoppard left his second wife.) Both are lovers of pop music who cannot distinguish between one opera and another. Both encourage their wives to be active even if it means being separated. Both enjoy cricket and fly-fishing, and both have relatively close relationships with their children. Both are conservative, outspoken critics of Marxism and the political left. While not all the details of Henry can be aligned with Stoppard, for the most part Henry’s views are also Stoppard’s.

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Running for over two years in the West End and for over a year on Broadway, The Real Thing was Stoppard’s biggest commercial success since Rosencrantz. As it did in its subsequent 1999–2000 revival, The Real Thing also earned multiple major awards in both cities. After its success, Stoppard was asked to write other works about love, but again he felt he had reached the end of a particular phase: For better or worse, that’s it – the love play! . . . You’ve done that. You can’t do it again. I think love is the only area that might be private to a writer. . . . I’ve been aware of the process that’s lasted 25 years, of shedding inhibition about self-revelation. I wouldn’t have dreamed of writing about it 10 years ago. (Gussow, 1995: 62) Having written his most personal play, Stoppard then closed the book on that type of writing. While The Real Thing was a worldwide success Stoppard’s next play, Hapgood (1988), was his first relative failure, the first time one of his major plays did not win a Best New Play Award. At the same time, Hapgood informs Arcadia as both turn to the world of science for their inspiration. Set in the late-1980s, Hapgood takes place in the world of espionage and the Cold War battle for scientific knowledge and military secrets. Hapgood, the lone female in the play, runs a British secret service operation that passes false information to the Russians. While it is set amidst the Cold War and makes passing reference to SDI (‘Star Wars’) weapons research of the 1980s, the play’s focus is not on socio-political issues. Instead, the play is rooted in Stoppard’s fascination with quantum physics and the way in which the wave/particle duality of light might serve as a metaphor for human personality; the idea that ‘one has a public self and a submerged self ’ (Gussow, 1995: 79). Stoppard’s metaphor is a statement that individuals are comprised of complex,

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even contradictory, personalities that add up to the whole person. While Hapgood ’s metaphor is relatively simple, the play itself is one of Stoppard’s most complex and difficult to understand. Mingled into the spy plot are discussions of quantum theory, including Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the two-slits experiment that proves the duality of light. A ramification of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is that it acts as a limit on the possibility of exact knowledge and it undermines the idea of a strictly causal universe. Another implication is that the act of observing alters the results; as explained in the play, the two-slits experiment shows that light is both wave and particle, that it is both continuous and discontinuous. For Stoppard, this breaking from an either/or to a both/and perspective is part of quantum physics’ metaphoric appeal. While quantum physics is a daunting topic, when Stoppard revised Hapgood for its 1994 New York premiere, he aptly noted: ‘It’s not the physics that’s the problem, it’s the story, the plot, the narrative, the mechanism, the twins, all that’ (Fleming, 1993: 25). For this New York production, published as the ‘Broadway Edition’, Stoppard made significant revisions, cutting twenty minutes of material, clarifying the spy plot (by eliminating much of the confusing spy terminology), and paring down some of the physics ‘lectures’ to make them clearer and more concise. Stoppard also found it helpful to think of the play as ‘a new-fashioned melodrama [that is] not satiric about the spy business [but which] operates on a heightened, slightly implausible level of life’ (Gussow, 1995: 80, 106). This improved Hapgood saw its limited run at the notfor-profit Lincoln Center extended three times. While both Hapgood and Arcadia explore scientific ideas and their metaphoric potential, they also offer illuminating contrasts in terms of play construction. Part of the difficulties of the London text of Hapgood is revealed in a very detailed nine-page ‘Hapgood

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Crib’ that Stoppard supplied to the production team as they struggled to understand the play. In the Crib, he writes: To be blunt, I don’t think that the mechanics of the plot bear scrutiny at all and I don’t think they ever will. The trouble is that they don’t remotely interest me, they’re just a necessary nuisance to provide the opportunity to write about this woman who in Blair’s words is ‘A sort of double’, and the way this bears upon her relationships with Kerner, Blair, and Ridley. (Stoppard, 1988) Intrigued by the physics and its metaphoric possibilities, Stoppard took pains to make the science as accurate as possible, but he neglected to clarify the narrative problems he knew existed, and the result was that he often lost his audience. After the relative failure of Hapgood where audiences were confused by the complicated plot, Stoppard began to express a belief that theatre’s primary function is as a story-telling event. He even declared that telling a story is the ‘sine qua non of playwriting’ (Nathan, 1993). Likewise, this concern for an effective plot helps account for the difference in reception between Arcadia and Hapgood. Stoppard notes: ‘Arcadia is as full of theses as anything I’ve ever done, but if I hadn’t found my way into a kind of detective story, none of it would have been worth a damn dramatically’ (Spencer, 1993b). Likewise, when I asked Stoppard to explain his statement that he felt Arcadia was the closest he had come to getting it right, he replied: ‘It’s not about the play, it’s about the audience. Theatre is an empirical art form. It’s a very pragmatic business, theatre. You’ve got all these people, and you’re trying to tell this story, and they either go with it or they don’t. And with Arcadia they do’ (Fleming, 1993: 22). Just as Arcadia’s alteration of past and present disrupts a linear narrative, so too does the appearance of Indian Ink in the Stoppard

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canon of stage plays. Produced in 1995, Indian Ink is a stage version of Stoppard’s 1991 radio play In the Native State, and thus the essence of Indian Ink predates Arcadia. Indian Ink is also an anomaly among Stoppard’s major plays in that its core content was not originally intended for the stage. In the Native State is like a poem, melding images as it involves a brilliant non-linear interweaving of past and present as the drama flows between India in 1930 and present-day London. The past scenes focus on Flora Crewe, an adventurous, sensual poet and her relationship with Nirad Das, a portrait painter. The present-day scenes focus on Das’s son’s meeting with Flora’s sister as they seek answers as to what happened back in India. The radio play emphasizes atmosphere and character, but in adapting it to the stage Stoppard made a stylistic change as now both the past and present-day plots are told in a linear fashion. Jane Edwardes aptly notes: ‘A near-perfect radio play [has been] transformed into a so-so stage play that lacks the delicacy and mysteriousness of the original’ (Edwardes, 1995). While India Ink enjoyed a ten-month West End run, it failed to win a Best New Play award and as of 2007 is the only major Stoppard play that has yet to be produced in New York. In terms of Stoppard’s creative process Hapgood, Arcadia and Indian Ink constitute a cyclical phase. All three were written for Felicity Kendal to play the lead role; this accounts for the accent on female protagonists. (After Stoppard and Kendal’s romantic relationship ended, he returned to writing more male-centred plays.) Though its stage production post-dates Arcadia, Indian Ink’s core content does not. Thus, while Arcadia is technically the middle play, it is more accurately the culmination of this phase as it mixes Hapgood ’s interest in science with In The Native State/Indian Ink’s satire on academics and its narrative alteration between past and present. Audiences had difficulty following Hapgood ’s intricate plot, and the play had less humour than a typical Stoppard play; and so when he returned to the realm of science for Arcadia, Stoppard

Background and Context 17

addressed these problems, focusing attention on crafting an engaging story filled with jokes. Indian Ink might also be joined with The Invention of Love (1997) to mark a different phase of Stoppard’s career. These two are Stoppard’s most character-driven plays. Also, unlike previous works, both plays are intimately connected to British culture: the Empire in India and Oxford in the Victorian era. Indian Ink marks a break in development as Stoppard’s plays have traditionally played well in foreign countries for the very fact that their cultural specificity was minimal. Written in dream-memory form, The Invention of Love is Stoppard’s impressionistic biography of A. E. Housman (1859– 1936), the pre-eminent classics scholar of his era who was also a minor poet. While there are a plethora of ideas explored in the play, Invention is character-driven. Stoppard notes: ‘I’ve always started with an idea before, often quite separate from whoever was in the play. This time I’ve started with whoever is in the play. The idea came exponentially, as the play grew’ (Hill, 1997). While Travesties was populated with historical figures, Stoppard had very limited interest in the personal lives; in contrast, Invention is intimately concerned with Housman’s personal life, including his repressed homosexuality. The choice of Housman struck many critics as an unlikely Stoppard topic. Notably, the playwright responded: ‘What initially attracted me to Housman was the two sides of him. The romantic mind of the poet and the analytical mind of the classical scholar’ (Hill, 1997). Like the metaphor that informs Hapgood and Arcadia, one sees Stoppard’s continuing interest in the duality of the human temperament and the reconciliation of seeming opposites. Since at least the 1970s, via works such as Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982), playwrights have increasingly used multiple time periods as an effective dramatic device. Stoppard himself uses it in both Arcadia and Indian Ink, but there he mostly

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just alternates between the two periods; in Invention, Stoppard intermingles them, allowing both the young and old Housman to interact, thereby dramatically representing the divided self by having two incarnations of the same character simultaneously present. While Stoppard uses such stylistic devices in new ways, thematically the play includes recurrent Stoppard motifs: the duality of humans; the need to balance opposite impulses; and, the passionate, relentless search for truth and meaning as a defining feature of humanity even as access to ultimate meaning remains elusive. While Invention marks Stoppard’s first in-depth use of biography, his follow-up, The Coast of Utopia (2002), embodies the use of historical figures on an epic scale. Described as ‘Chekhovian in spirit, and Tolstoyian in scale’ (Grimes, 2006), The Coast of Utopia is Stoppard’s most ambitious work, an over eight-hour trilogy (Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage) that examines nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals. Set amidst the fervour of the Romantic Revolution and budding socialism of the mid-1800s, the play looks at the men who helped transform tsarist Russia, including the freeing of the serfs. At different points centred on the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and the socialist Alexander Herzen, Coast sweeps across thirty-five years of social and political history and the lives of the men who made it. While these figures are little known outside academic circles, their connection to certain ideas makes them reflective of some of Stoppard’s own views. While Bakunin’s anarchism is antithetical to Stoppard’s political position, Bakunin embraced the continent’s approach to the sociological aspects of Romanticism. Stoppard writes: ‘But in Europe it was human nature which the Romantic Revolution worshipped, the liberation of the individual from the yoke of moral and political absolutism’ (Stoppard, 2002). While Bakunin is the focus of Voyage, Stoppard’s initial entry was Belinsky. He was struck by Belinsky’s wilful return to tsarist Russia: ‘He wanted to get back to the punitive restrictions in Russia where, as a

Background and Context 19

consequence of censorship, “people look to writers as their real leaders”’ (Stoppard, 2002). Belinsky’s attitude resonated with Stoppard’s own experience with Czech dissidents during the Soviet regime and their subsequent post-Communist nostalgia for when art and writing had carried greater weight. While Belinsky appears in each of the three plays, Shipwreck and Salvage gain their emotional weight from their emphasis on Herzen. In his research Stoppard found a kindred spirit in Herzen, who, though a socialist, opposed Marx: Herzen had no time for the kind of mono-theory that bound history, progress and individual autonomy to some overarching abstraction like Marx’s material dialecticism. What he did have time for . . . was the individual over the collective, the actual over the theoretical. What he detested above all was the conceit that future bliss justified present sacrifice . . . Nothing much could be counted on – ‘only art, and the summer lightning of personal happiness’ – but if nothing was certain everything was possible. (Stoppard, 2006b) While it is difficult to distil The Coast of Utopia, the quotation above shows how a conservative such as Stoppard was able to find common ground with the first self-proclaimed socialist of Russia. While Coast had a mixed response in London, Stoppard condensed and refined the text for its 2006 – 2007 New York premiere. Via Jack O’Brien’s direction, a stunning visual design, and an exemplary cast, the Lincoln Center production of The Coast of Utopia won seven Tony awards, eclipsing the old non-musical record of six Tonys won by Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2006). The play also won Stoppard his sixth New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, tying him with August Wilson for most Best Play wins. The Coast of Utopia’s interest in social and political theory carried over into Stoppard’s next play, Rock ’n’ Roll (2006), only now the

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setting is modern and sprinkled with the personal subtext of the divide between Stoppard’s birth country, Czechoslovakia, and his adopted homeland, England. The play begins with the Prague Spring of 1968 (when the Soviets crushed the burgeoning freedoms of the Czech people), and ends with the overthrow of Communism in Czechoslovakia via the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The story also moves between the awakening political consciousness of Jan, a rock ’n’ roll loving Czech dissident, and his former mentor, a Marxist don at Cambridge. Jan’s exuberant declarations of his love for England and its tradition of freedom reflect Stoppard’s own feelings; the play also adds a cautionary note as another character argues that England has become a ‘democracy of obedience’ (Stoppard, 2006a: 105). At the same time, the don’s wife offers a passionate rebuke of his materialist, mechanistic views as she champions the metaphysical mystery of being human. Mixing the personal and the political, Rock ’n’ Roll won Stoppard his eighth Evening Standard award. In his eleven major plays Stoppard has explored a variety of subjects and a diversity of styles. He has offered a heady mixture of intellectual inquiry, a liberal dose of comedy and some palpable human emotion. Through these works Stoppard has articulated a worldview in which life contains a high degree of relativity but in which there is also some sort of absolute truth or metaphysical essence that is beyond our grasp to comprehend fully. Stoppard continually shows a world in which things are simultaneously both this and that, and where there is a dynamic interplay between absolute and relative values.

The cultural and intellectual context

For socially engaged British drama, exemplified by the work of writers such as Arnold Wesker, David Hare and Caryl Churchill, it is customary to analyse plays by reference to the social, economic and political circumstances of their creation. By contrast, the

Background and Context 21

specific socio-political milieu during the composition of Stoppard’s Arcadia is less illuminating. Instead, it is perhaps more helpful to consider the place from which Stoppard writes. Stoppard’s work shares traits with both modernism and postmodernism. In ‘Postmodernism: Roots and Politics’, Todd Gitlin distinguishes among premodernism (realism), modernism and postmodernism. The premodernist work seeks unity of vision, continuity, sequence, causality in time or space and a single narrative voice. The modernist work aspires to a unity that is ‘constructed, assembled from fragments . . . It shifts abruptly among a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, materials . . . The orders of conventional reality – inside versus outside, subject versus object, self versus other – are called into question . . . The work composes beauty out of discord’ (Gitlin, 1989: 349). Stoppard’s use of multiple perspectives, parodic echoing and seeming instability (some of the traits that lead critics to label him postmodern) are characteristic of the modernist temperament that Gitlin describes. This is especially true when contrasted by Gitlin’s vision of postmodernism: The search for unity has apparently been abandoned altogether. Instead we have textuality, a cultivation of surfaces endlessly referring to, ricocheting from, reverberating onto other surfaces. The work calls attention to its arbitrariness, constructedness; it interrupts itself. Instead of a single centre, there is pastiche, cultural recombination . . . Not only has the master voice dissolved . . . The implied subject is fragmented, unstable, even decomposed; it is finally nothing more than a crosshatch of discourses. (Gitlin, 1989: 350) While Stoppard’s plays are known for stylistic flair, nothing in a Stoppard work is arbitrary; underneath the sometimes-disorienting surface, the plays are highly ordered and underpinned with logic

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and a point of view. Furthermore, Stoppard’s emphasis on linguistic matters and rational discourse places him much more firmly in the camp of modernism than it does in the nonintentional visual montages of a postmodern theatre artist such as Robert Wilson or in the deconstruction-based work of The Wooster Group. Conversely, perhaps the way in which Stoppard may most be seen as postmodern is if one uses the criteria of how one responds to uncertainty in the world. According to Alan Wilde, modernists exhibit anxiety and a sense of loss whereas postmodernists are characterized by ‘a willingness to live with uncertainty, to tolerate and, in some cases, to welcome a world seen as random and multiple, even, at times, absurd’ (Wilde, 1987: 44). Many of Stoppard’s plays show an acceptance of uncertainty and instability as being central components of the world, however his plays also embrace order, logic and those things that provide stability in an uncertain world. The both/and quality of Stoppard’s work allows him to cut across categories and to attract admirers from different critical, theoretical and ideological backgrounds. In ‘“Is postmodernism?”: Stoppard among/against the postmoderns’, Michael Vanden Heuvel offers an excellent assessment of how Stoppard is and is not a postmodernist. While Stoppard explores many postmodern issues and employs postmodern techniques such as pastiche and intertextuality, he remains fundamentally at odds with ‘postmodern social theory and its image of the human subject’ (Vanden Heuvel, 2001: 213), and works through postmodernism ‘back to more traditional assumptions and beliefs’ (Vanden Heuvel, 2001: 220). While Stoppard’s work shares some traits with postmodernism, I think it is helpful to view Stoppard as continuing and extending high modernism’s experimentation with aesthetic expression. Like modernist writers he admires (such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Oscar Wilde), Stoppard downplays the social function of art, rarely writing plays that directly engage with the social-historical

Background and Context 23

moment. Instead he rigorously pursues aesthetic effect and innovation as he explores various intellectual ideas that interest him. Furthermore, the ideology that informs his work is decidedly conventional: Stoppard firmly believes in the values associated with Western, liberal humanism. As he told the critic Mel Gussow: ‘I’m a conservative with a small c. I’m a conservative in politics, literature, education, and theatre. My main objection is to ideology and dogma – Holy Writ for adherents’ (Gussow, 1995: 37). Considering how Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) and Travesties champion traditional art, it is not surprising that Stoppard’s 2001 speech at the Royal Academy of Arts annual dinner included a stinging critique of the new wave of conceptual art. The ensuing backlash of editorials, articles and letters attacked Stoppard for being a reactionary conservative who championed bourgeois tastes. He was criticized as ‘a generation divider; to the middle class, middle aged and reasonably educated, he provides a comforting experience reinforcing their values with his so-clever dialogue and brittle repartee’ (Street-Porter, 2001). Rather than state it as a positive or negative value judgement, it is fair to say that among British playwrights Stoppard is indeed considered a reactionary conservative. He once said: ‘I write out of my experience as a middle-class bourgeois who prefers to read a book almost to doing anything else’ (Hudson, 1974: 67). Stoppard lives the life of the bourgeois intellectual, and his work revolves around the values, views and ideology of that lifestyle. As an intellectual he can see the validity of multiple points of view on a given topic, and while he is aware of the complexity of issues, he ultimately professes belief in ‘western liberal democracy, favouring an intellectual elite and a progressive middle class and based on a moral order derived from Christian absolutes’ (Stoppard, 1977). Though never practicing any specific religion, Stoppard has been a steadfast theist. Likewise, one suspects that Stoppard’s concept of moral absolutes is something along the lines of the United Nations

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a profession of the appropriate ethical treatment of human beings. Overall, Stoppard can be characterized as a patriotic, conservative, bourgeois, middle-class values/upper-class income, intellectual who rejects moral relativism, and who eschews rigid ideology in favour of a set of core values that include personal freedom, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. While Stoppard has won numerous awards, he has been something of a polarizing figure. Post-war British drama has had a strong grounding in theatre that is socially and politically engaged. Thus, some critics have faulted Stoppard for being apolitical or at odds with the Marxist leanings of playwrights such as David Hare, Howard Brenton or Caryl Churchill. Other critics find the sheer amount of intellectual material one must know (or absorb) in order to fully appreciate a Stoppard play to be off-putting. These same critics have also accused his plays of being cold and lacking emotion. Likewise, the slickness of Stoppard’s work is decidedly different than the gritty content of the younger so-called In-Yer-Face playwrights such as Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane or Patrick Marber. Indeed, the Royal Court’s decision to premiere Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll as part of their 50th anniversary season was controversial. Believing that the mainstream, conservative Stoppard was the antithesis of what the Royal Court stood for, former artistic director William Gaskill registered his protest by withdrawing his promised participation in the 50th anniversary celebration. While Stoppard is indebted to the art that has gone before him, his artistry is not linked to any one particular school of playwriting, but instead Stoppard is emblematic of the Romantic notion of the artistic genius; his vision has followed a determined course of individualism. While each of his plays can be linked to the personal, historic moment of Stoppard’s life, placing his individual plays within the specific social-political context of their creation is less fruitful. That said, Arcadia can be viewed in light

Background and Context 25

of the theatrical tradition of the twentieth-century’s fascination with science. In Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006), Kirsten Shepherd-Barr documents over one hundred plays that deal with science-related subjects, noting that the 1990s were a particularly fertile decade for ‘science plays’. These works have come from four different sources: 1) established playwrights who have developed an interest in science; 2) scientists who are writing plays to convey scientific ideas to a general audience; 3) science plays that were written during periods where documentary theatre has been popular (such as Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1964)) and 4) collaborations between scientists and theatre directors who create works that are rooted more in performance techniques than in literary texts (Shepherd-Barr, 2006: 4). While Shepherd-Barr notes that the sweep of subjects includes ‘neurology, physics, biology, evolution, genetics, reproductive technology, epidemiology, biochemistry, mathematics, and astronomy’ (Shepherd-Barr, 2006: 1), the thematic focus is often split between ‘plays about social implications of science, plays about scientists as people, and plays which centre on science itself ’ (Kupferman, 2003). Examples of the first kind include Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists (1962), Howard Brenton’s The Genius (1983), Shelagh Stephenson’s An Experiment with an Air-Pump (1998) and Caryl Churchill’s A Number (2002), all of which ‘raise questions about the public responsibility of the scientist and the nature of his or her pursuits’ (Shepherd-Barr, 2006: 3). The second kind, plays about scientists, includes Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo (1939, 1947), Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998), Peter Parnell’s QED (2001) and Vern Thiesen’s Einstein’s Gift (2003). This list also includes Stoppard’s own unproduced Galileo (1972), a rebuttal to Brecht’s depiction of the eponymous figure. The final type, plays that centre on science, includes Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s The Man Who (1994, 2002), Timberlake Wertenbaker’s After Darwin

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(1998), as well as Stoppard’s Hapgood and Arcadia. (The very successful Proof (2000), by David Auburn, is only tangentially a science play as its mathematical content is not intrinsic to the play; its core concerns are the family dynamics and the relationship between genius and madness.) Shepherd-Barr cites multiple reasons for the recent surge in science plays (Shepherd-Barr, 2006: 41–60). She also notes the role of economics: since 1998 the Sloan Foundation in New York has actively solicited and funded science-based plays, and since the early 2000s the Wellcome Trust in Great Britain has engaged in similar activities (Shepherd-Barr, 2006: 11). Both organizations seek to use the arts to raise public awareness of science issues. On the other hand, the most successful recent science plays – Copenhagen, Arcadia and Margaret Edson’s Wit (1999) – have risen through traditional theatre-producing mechanisms. While the arts and sciences are often viewed as antithetical realms, as Arcadia makes clear, both are manifestations of the human drive for knowledge of the world and understanding of life. Since science has played an ever-increasing role in daily life and social functioning over the last two centuries, it is not entirely surprising that artists have turned to science for source material. In some cases it is the compelling drama of a scientist (as either hero or villain) fiercely trying to achieve a goal, while in other cases it is the ethical issues spurred by new discoveries, such as cloning, that have created the dramatic tension. Shelagh Stephenson goes further as she argues: ‘I think it is because there isn’t religion anymore . . . People now look to science for answers’ (Taitte, 2000). While Stephenson’s comment carries a strong degree of validity, particularly in secularized British society, Stoppard again runs contrary to this view as he weaves metaphysics into all three of his science plays. Stoppard’s fascination with science is more akin to novelist Ian McEwan’s view that since art deals with human nature, science offers a means of dealing with timeless issues in new ways, and thus

Background and Context 27

is valuable for the metaphors and images it provides (ShepherdBarr, 2006: 49–50). Often the scientific issues connect to broader philosophical or epistemological questions. Science also provides an avenue to explore ‘how we know what we know, how identity is constructed, what the ethical choice is in an immoral situation, what our responsibility is in our deployment of knowledge, how we can know ourselves and each other, and so on’ (Shepherd-Barr, 2006: 47). While science plays come from many sources and cover varying fields, John Stokes has argued that most science plays are ‘attempts to investigate human problems by reference to scientific ideas’ (Stokes, 2002). From an artistic perspective, science plays, including Arcadia, often display a strong correlation between form and content, with the ‘best ones successfully employ[ing] a particular scientific idea or concept as an extended theatrical metaphor’ (Shepherd-Barr, 2006: 6). Likewise, successful science plays are often aware of the importance of theatricality, rejecting straight realism as their mode of presentation (Shephard-Barr, 2006: 32). Notably, Shepherd-Barr cites Arcadia as influencing the subsequent wave of science plays (such as An Experiment with an Air-Pump, After Darwin and Oxygen (2000)) that use the juxtaposition of different time periods as a dramaturgical device (Shepherd-Barr, 2006: 42). Overall, Arcadia stands near the forefront of theatre’s turn of the millennium fascination with science. In a world where the three most groundbreaking scientific theories of the twentieth century were relativity, quantum physics and chaos theory, it is appropriate for a play to address how the latter has influenced human understanding of the world we live in.

2 Analysis and Commentary

This chapter examines Arcadia as both a dramatic text and as the blueprint for a theatrical event. For clarity of discussion, a basic plot summary is provided as a precursor to the more detailed discussions of character, influences, themes and scene analysis.

Plot summary

Arcadia is set in a simple, but elegant room in a large Derbyshire country house, with the action alternating between the early 1800s and the present-day. The house, in both periods, is owned by the Coverlys, the head of whom holds the title of Lord Croom. Two scholars in the present-day, Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, investigate the events that transpired at the house during the early 1800s. These scholars’ (often inaccurate) horticultural and literary sleuthing provides comedic and dramatic enjoyment as the audience gets to see and hear their interpretations of the past as well as the events they are trying to describe and prove. The first four scenes comprise Act One, while Scenes Five through Seven constitute the second act. Scene One opens in 1809 with the tutor Septimus Hodge, 22, and his precocious pupil Thomasina Coverly, 13. She is the daughter of Lady Croom, the home’s owner and hostess to a weekend of guests that include minor poet Ezra Chater, his promiscuous (off-stage) wife Mrs Chater and the off-stage Lord Byron. To Lady Croom’s consternation, her off-stage husband has hired Mr Noakes, a landscape architect, to transform the house’s orderly, classically

Analysis and Commentary 29

arranged gardens into the untamed sprawling wilderness of a landscape inspired by Romantic and Gothic literature. The scene establishes pivotal plot points of Septimus’s affair with Mrs Chater, his penning of a review of Mr Chater’s Couch of Eros and the possibility of a duel between Septimus and Mr Chater. Scene Two is set in the present. Hannah Jarvis, a successful, independent scholar in her late 30s, is at the Croom estate researching a book on English landscape and literature from 1750 to 1834, the period of transition from the Neoclassical era to the Romantic era. Though he had written a scathing review of Hannah’s best-selling book on novelist Caroline Lamb (1785–1828), the flamboyant, egotistical university lecturer Bernard Nightingale must secure the favour of Hannah in order to pursue his own line of inquiry at the Croom estate. Driven by a desire for fame and media attention, Bernard arrives determined to prove his theory that Lord Byron killed Chater in a duel and then fled the country. The scene also establishes the forthcoming dress ball and introduces the modernday occupants of the Croom/Coverly home. Valentine is a graduate student mathematician who uses the principles of deterministic chaos to study the changing patterns of the grouse population on the family estate. Chloë, 18, is somewhat of a present-day foil to Thomasina and also serves as Bernard’s future love interest. Gus, 15, is the mysteriously silent savant. Scene Three returns to 1809, on the morning after Scene One. Thomasina continues with her Latin and mathematics lessons, including her desire to discover a ‘New Geometry of Irregular Forms’ (43), a system to unlock the mathematical secrets of the natural world. In the process, she prefigures the concept behind iterated algorithms; the explanation of her approach and the process of iteration are elaborated in Scene Four. Meanwhile, Mr Chater has learned that Septimus wrote the scathing review of his first book of poetry The Maid of Turkey, and so, accompanied by Captain Brice, he has resumed his call for a duel. Lady Croom’s interruption

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includes a pivotal moment where she takes Septimus’s copy of The Couch of Eros to give to Lord Byron. Scene Four picks up with Valentine explaining to Hannah the significance of what Thomasina wrote in her maths primer. Much of the scene’s dialogue between Hannah and Valentine revolves around iterated algorithms and aspects of deterministic chaos, concepts that will be explained later in this chapter. Their thematic musings are interrupted by Bernard’s discovery of more circumstantial evidence linking Byron to Chater. Notably, Bernard wilfully overlooks that the pencilled superscription is not in Byron’s handwriting. While the audience knows that Bernard is wrong, Hannah adds to the mystery by revealing that a widowed Mrs Chater married Captain Brice in 1810. Likewise, Valentine supplies proof that Byron was indeed at Sidley Park (i.e. the Croom estate) in 1809. As the first act comes to a close, Bernard is clearly set up for a fall, while the closing exchange between Hannah and Valentine suggests that the Sidley Park hermit may have been engaged in the endless pursuit of iterating Thomasina’s algorithm. Scene Five opens with Bernard delivering his intended conference paper to Valentine, Chloë and eventually Hannah. Bernard’s showmanship and his gift for rhetorical flourishes are on full display as he weaves his fanciful tale of how Byron killed Chater in a duel. The periodic interruptions by the assembled audience reveal their respective attitudes. Chloë is Bernard’s staunchest supporter; she is clearly smitten, continually defending him and embracing the sexual aspects of the story Bernard tells. In contrast, Hannah and Valentine insist on academic rigour as they point out moments where Bernard makes absolute statements without considering possible alternatives. Likewise, Hannah notes: ‘You’ve left out everything which doesn’t fit’ (59). When she proceeds to challenge the underlying flaws of Bernard’s argument, he lashes back with a stinging critique of her first book. The ensuing heated debate among Bernard, Valentine and Hannah ripples with intensity on issues of

Analysis and Commentary 31

art, science and knowledge, topics explored later in this chapter. On other matters, the scene reveals that Bernard has indeed been sleeping with Chloë, his propositioning of Hannah, Valentine’s giving up on his grouse project and Hannah’s discovery of a piece of information that leads her to believe that Septimus was the Sidley Park hermit. Scene Six begins with an aural echo of the close of Act One with the early morning sound of a pistol shot and crows flying. From previous information, the gunshot seems to indicate the early morning duel that was to be fought between Septimus and Chater. In point of fact, there was no duel, but rather Septimus has shot a rabbit for Thomasina. Though Septimus had been preparing for the duel, the butler, Jellaby, reveals that the Chaters, Captain Brice and Lord Byron all left hastily in the middle of the night after Lady Croom caught Mrs Chater exiting Byron’s bedroom. The sexual imbroglios are further extended via Septimus having penned an amorous letter to Lady Croom; in a witty exchange, they express their mutual desire in consummating an affair. At the same time, seemingly trivial details such as Mr Chater becoming a pseudobotanist, Captain Brice’s affair with Mrs Chater and Septimus burning an unopened letter from Byron all ripple into the texture of the present-day conversations and events as they either prove or disprove the suppositions of the modern characters’ attempts to understand and explain the past. Scene Seven occupies a quarter of the play’s text as it expertly both alternates and interweaves the two time periods. Within the scene there are six units or sub-scenes: two featuring only presentday characters, two with only past characters and two where both sets of characters share the stage. The first unit is a present-day scene set on the day of the dress ball, and thus some of the present-day characters are costumed, at least partly, in Regency clothes. The newspaper headlines are proclaiming Bernard’s sensational theory of Byron’s deadly duel while Valentine and Chloë discuss the degree to which the universe is

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deterministic or not. More importantly, Hannah and Valentine engage in another thematic dialogue regarding the tenuousness of human knowledge. The exchange includes one of the most significant lines of the play, Hannah’s declaration: ‘It’s wanting to know that makes us matter’ (75). Hannah’s passionate exaltation of the human quest for knowledge gives way to a detail that ripples with poignancy as the scene progresses: Thomasina died in a fire on the night before her seventeenth birthday. The second unit mixes the present with the past, but it is now 1812, and her fifteen-year-old brother Augustus joins the sixteenyear-old Thomasina for her drawing lesson with Septimus. The interweaving dialogue covers another iteration by Thomasina, the unidirectional flow of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the popularity of Byron in England in 1812. On the personal level, Thomasina has become enamoured of Septimus, and he has promised to teach her how to waltz. Their bond is also intellectual as both take an interest in a scientific article that supports Thomasina’s earlier supposition that the world is not as deterministic as Newton’s laws had suggested. The close of the unit involves the subtle interaction between the two periods as Hannah reads what Lady Croom discloses: Chater was killed by a monkey-bite, direct evidence that disproves Bernard’s theory which has now been widely publicized. The third unit is a continuation of the second unit but it involves only the characters of 1812. Thomasina’s analysis of the scientific article reiterates the idea that while Newton’s equations go backwards and forwards, the heat equation goes only one way. Other details start to wrap up plot points and solve mysteries. One piece of dialogue refutes Bernard’s assertion that Hannah’s book jacket illustration was incorrect while another shows that Septimus’s brother was his connection to the reviews published in the Piccadilly Recreation. Likewise, Thomasina’s heat diagram drawing and sketch of Septimus with his pet tortoise, Plautus, are also executed here.

Analysis and Commentary 33

The fourth unit returns to the present, and begins with Bernard’s colourful exhortation: ‘Fucked by a dahlia!’ (88). Hannah has revealed to him the fateful evidence, and gleefully promises to see to it that the lasting result of Bernard’s appearance on ‘The Breakfast Hour’ will be egg on his face. He realizes he has overreached himself and must now get his comeuppance. The fifth unit is later that same week in 1812, the night before Thomasina’s seventeenth birthday. Septimus is reading her essay on heat exchange and reviewing her iterated algorithm when a barefoot, dressing gown clad Thomasina enters the room. There is a sensual, seductiveness to the scene as she kisses him and asks for her waltz lesson. As they wait for the neighbouring piano music to change to a waltz, the scene flows into the next unit. The sixth unit again intermingles the time periods. The piano music gives way to modern music as the present-day party is now in full swing as darkness has descended. In a magical, theatrical moment, both Septimus and Valentine simultaneously study Thomasina’s diagram of heat exchange. Each explains his understanding of it, from Septimus’s assertion that ultimately ‘we are all doomed!’ (93) to Valentine’s realization that Thomasina was a genius who intuited the Second Law of Thermodynamics but lacked the mathematical knowledge to explain it. The intellectual discussion gives way to the personal dynamics of Septimus teaching Thomasina how to waltz and Bernard trying to beat a hasty retreat after Chloë’s mother caught them in flagrante within the hermitage. In contrast to the present-day liaison between Bernard and Chloë, Septimus, though attracted to Thomasina, declines her sexual invitation. Then as Septimus and Thomasina share another graceful waltz, Gus presents Hannah with the evidence to prove that Septimus was the hermit of Sidley Park. As gratitude, Hannah momentarily drops her emotional reserve and begins an awkward waltz with Gus. The play closes with the contrasting couples waltzing around the room.

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Character analysis

Arcadia provides rich, complex roles for actors, as it offers both period characters and present-day characters. As usual, Stoppard’s stage directions and character descriptions are minimal. Indeed, one of the challenges of playing a Stoppard character is that he often treats characters as mouthpieces for ideas, and rather than creating detailed background lives for his characters, Stoppard relies ‘heavily on the actor’s performance to help individualize a character’ (Guppy, 1988: 184). Likewise, in Arcadia, while the present-day characters tend to be drawn realistically, some of the past characters are (richly enjoyable) character types. As Jim Hunter notes, the 1800s scenes also sometimes rely on données, fictional facts that the audience must accept without them being fully created for us; Thomasina’s genius and Septimus’s love for Lady Croom stand as prime examples (Hunter, 2000: 185). In Arcadia, part of Stoppard’s creation of character results from his desire to explore perceived contrasts in romantic versus classical temperaments, with the former being more intuitive, emotional and impulsive and the latter being more logical, intellectual and restrained. In the play, Stoppard presents five main characters that are engaged in the quest for knowledge. Thomasina, Septimus and Valentine are pursuing an understanding of the world from a scientific perspective, while Hannah and Bernard represent the humanities. Characteristic of Stoppard’s desire to complicate matters, the three ‘scientists’ are the least Newtonian – Thomasina intuits the shortcomings of the Newtonian model; Septimus is perplexed and made sceptical by her theorems; and Valentine is a working chaotician. In contrast, Hannah and Bernard are more ‘scientific’ in their outlook and approach, and through their respective attempts to interpret the past, Stoppard exhibits classical and romantic temperaments at work. Stoppard also draws a contrast between the past and present-day characters in terms of their attitude towards the acquisition of

Analysis and Commentary 35

knowledge. The past scenes with Thomasina and Septimus are imbued with a romantic notion of research for the sake of intellectual progress. Thomasina desires ‘the advancement of knowledge’ (37) whereas Bernard seeks ‘fame’ (31). Indeed, in the present day, Hannah, Bernard and Valentine almost always couch their discoveries in terms of what is and is not publishable. The characters’ attitude suggests how publication authorizes worth, while also allowing Stoppard to satirize the excessive importance placed on publication, as opposed to teaching, as the means by which professors procure advancement. Bernard’s own attitude towards teaching is to ‘let the brats sort it out for themselves’ (21). An added satire on contemporary academe can be found in Bernard’s insistence to Hannah: ‘No, no, look at me, not at the book’ (30). This moment is suggestive of the shift in literary criticism from emphasizing the work of the artist to the work of the interpreter, and it also satirizes the ego of a scholar who sees himself as more important than the evidence.

Hannah

Hannah is simply described as an author, in her late 30s, who wears nothing frivolous (15). Based on the cachet of being a best-selling author, Hannah has been given free run of the Croom estate to write her next book (18). She is emotionally reserved, and her dominant personality is ‘scientific’ and classical; her palindromic name might even be seen as an embodiment of Newtonian classicism, as the spelling of her name, like Newton’s equations, ‘go forwards and backwards’ (87) (Zeifman, 2001: 187). Hannah is a champion of the dispassionate intellect. Her research on the evolution of the gardens at the Croom estate is aimed at documenting ‘the decline from thinking to feeling’ (27). To her, the Romantic movement was a ‘sham’, while the ordered, classical garden represented ‘paradise in the age of reason’ (27). Hannah sees the world in binary terms

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and privileges thought over emotion, the classical temperament over the romantic. Disliking sentimentality and limiting her emotional expressions to instances of the gains and losses of the intellect, Hannah views emotion as an unwanted irregularity, a potential collapse into disorder. Ironically, to prove her idea that ‘The Age of Enlightenment [was] banished into the Romantic wilderness’ (66), Hannah must rely on instinct and intuition. In short, she embodies Stoppard’s notion that classical and romantic temperaments are not mutually exclusive, but rather co-exist in people. Valentine believes her ‘classical reserve is only a mannerism’ (75), while Bernard can see Hannah’s other side: ‘It takes a romantic to make a heroine out of Caroline Lamb. You were cut out for Byron’ (63). Again, it is a matter of life being understood via a both/and paradigm. Specific background on Hannah is very limited. There is no indication of her childhood, her social upbringing or political leanings. Likewise, though she is a scholar and best-selling independent author, no mention is made of her education. Bernard is jealous of the fact that she does not need to teach to support her research, and he is one of the many academics who panned her best seller. Her book argued that Byron’s genius was overrated, while Caroline Lamb was ‘the closet intellectual shafted by a male society!’ (60). Were the academic critiques rooted in jealousy over her mainstream success or were they legitimately, intellectually at odds with her feminist, historical revisionism? Likely, it is a combination of the two. While Hannah is presented as emotionally detached, there is no clear indication as to the cause. Bernard’s intimation that she is sexually repressed (63) and Chloë’s supposition that Hannah must have ‘been deeply wounded in the past’ (57) may reveal as much about the speaker as they do about Hannah. Stoppard wrote the role for his then girlfriend Felicity Kendal, and biographer Ira Nadel cites Kendal as the muse for Hannah being ‘energetic, inquisitive, strong’ (Nadel, 2002: 319). A fine actress, Kendal has also long

Analysis and Commentary 37

been recognized as a major sex symbol in England, which might provide some of the textual suggestion that Hannah possesses an understated sexuality. Both Valentine and Bernard are sexually attracted to her. Valentine’s casual proposals are easily rebuffed, and she is not inclined to reveal personal information to him. On the other hand, Bernard’s direct propositioning for sex does lead to one of Hannah’s few personal revelations: ‘Chaps sometimes wanted to marry, and I don’t know a worse bargain. Available sex against not being allowed to fart in bed’ (63). Overall, Hannah is at a point in her life where sex and romance are ‘less important’ (33); instead, she is driven by intellectual pursuits and the personal quest for knowledge as the source of meaning for her life.

Bernard

Bernard is described as a don in his late 30s, with a tendency to dress flamboyantly (15). Stoppard’s suggestion of costuming serves as the marker for the way in which Bernard is, at first glance, Hannah’s antithesis. Bernard embodies the romantic temperament in that he is energetic, passionate and prone to intuition. His wearing of a ‘peacock-coloured display handkerchief ’ (16), suggests the degree to which Bernard’s character is one of style over substance. Characteristic of a romantic, Bernard takes a fervently intuitive approach to his research: By which I mean a visceral belief in yourself. Gut instinct. The part of you that doesn’t reason. The certainty for which there is no back-reference. Because time is reversed. Tock, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself, but it was enough, you were in there and you bloody know. (50) While the science level of Stoppard’s play acknowledges that the laws of the universe indicate that time can only go forward,

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Bernard’s declaration suggests that human intuition is an aspect of life that is more mysterious, something that cannot be confined and explained by science. Typical of Stoppard’s complicating of perspectives, Bernard’s gut instinct is proved dead wrong, while Hannah is ultimately able to prove the validity of her instinctually derived thesis that Septimus was the hermit of Sidley Park. Thus, human intuition is neither completely valorized nor debunked. While Bernard’s dominant temperament is romantic, he, too, exhibits traits of the scientific and classical personality. When he tries to reconstruct the story of Byron’s stay at Sidley Park, he thinks in terms of strict linearity and order. He accumulates data from a variety of sources, and then tries to make it fit his pre-ordained cause-to-effect pattern. He makes the mistake of starting with a desired conclusion, and only seeks information that will make his line of reasoning sufficiently logical. Bernard’s unerring faith in his theory makes the lack of convincing evidence immaterial; he is determined to prove his theory whether it is true or not. While Bernard’s arrogance and lust for fame are obvious character flaws, his more subtle shortcoming is that his sought-after explanation is based on a Newtonian paradigm of complete order; this means that it ignores the complexity and contradiction of real life, such as the fact that Byron took Septimus’s book and that one of Byron’s letters was burned. Instead of trying to understand how the events actually occurred, he has created an idealized account. His Newtonian narrative is limited, and ultimately is proven false because Bernard has allowed himself to see only what he has wanted to see. Hannah summarizes the problems of Bernard’s approach to scholarship: ‘You’ve left out everything which doesn’t fit . . . you’re arrogant, greedy, and reckless. You’ve gone from a glint in your eye to a sure thing in a hop, skip, and a jump’ (59). While Bernard is the object of Stoppard’s satire on the excesses of academic ambition and competition, he is also an advocate for another type of knowledge – the understanding that comes

Analysis and Commentary 39

from the appreciation of art. Possessing a romantic temperament, Bernard provides a passionate defence, as he argues that art and artistic genius are mysterious realms of life that cannot be quantified in scientific terms: ‘Parameters! You can’t stick Byron’s head in your laptop! Genius isn’t like your average grouse’ (60). Throughout the play, Bernard offers a Romantic valorization of art and philosophy, as he suggests great art is timeless. Bernard’s paradoxical nature is that while he is an advocate for the non-utilitarian value of art as a means to self-knowledge (61), he is also driven by commercial interests; he wants to prove his theory of Byron not because of any particular literary value it offers, but rather because of the fame, fortune and advancement it will bring him. The University of Sussex, where Bernard teaches, has a reputation for radicalism and is known for its Cultural Materialists and Marxists. Since Bernard is ultimately made to look foolish, Stoppard may have been subtly expressing his view of Sussex’s theoretical approach, or he may have chosen the school simply for its sound quality. As with Hannah, there is no indication of Bernard’s upbringing or political persuasion. He drives a red Mazda (19); though the specific model is not named, one pictures Bernard driving a sporty Mazda MX-5 convertible, fulfilling his self-image of the dashing don. For Bernard, teaching students is a source of income rather than a passion and in general, Bernard is driven by self-interest; he also knows how to get what he wants from people. Prior to the revelation of his affair with Chloë, her mother was ‘in a flutter about Bernard’ (51), and in their first meeting he plays the flattery card to get the information he seeks from Hannah. Chloë describes him as ‘bouncy on his feet’ with ‘a lot of sexual energy’ (33). For Bernard, their subsequent sexual tryst, his ‘first experience of the landed aristocracy’ leaves him ‘boggle-eyed’ (64). His unthinking, callous dismissal of her in Scene Seven reveals the degree to which it was a purely physical liaison for him, though more personal and emotional for her.

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The contemporary Coverlys

While Hannah and Bernard function as vehicles for Stoppard’s thematic explorations of personal temperaments, the other presentday characters serve other purposes. While it is possible to read the present Coverly family as a commentary on how some aristocratic families live off their past (Hunter, 2000: 188), it is doubtful whether Stoppard intended any such social commentary. Indeed, Valentine, Chloë, Gus, as well as their off-stage parents, are modern aristocrats from the structural need to use the same room in multiple time periods. Valentine, 25–30, is a post-graduate biologist and mathematician, who is also an expert at computers. Technically at Oxford, Valentine is somewhat homebound, as he seems to be trying to find himself. As a member of the landed aristocracy, he comes from a position of privilege. Valentine is also something of an innocent, in love with Hannah, but with no real chance of being with her. For Stoppard, his primary purpose is to explain the play’s intellectual concepts as they relate to deterministic chaos. Some of his key speeches will be discussed later in the chapter. Chloë is 18, and there is no indication of whether she is in school; presumably she does not work. Embodying contemporary teenage sexuality, her self-confidence stems from a false sense of maturity. She enters into the sexual relationship with Bernard under a belief that it is true romance, but when her mother catches them, her youthful innocence and vulnerability is revealed. Her romantic image of lovers fleeing distress is met by Bernard’s chilly dismissal of their having any future. Nevertheless, she clings to the face-saving hope that ‘it was worth it, though, wasn’t it?’ (95). Thematically, she serves as something of a modern foil to Thomasina and is instrumental to the modern sexual plot points. Gus, 15, is the silent savant who stopped speaking at the age of five. Shy and nervous around strangers, he has a youthful romantic crush on Hannah. Though not readily apparent from the text,

Analysis and Commentary 41

Stoppard did have thematic intent in his creation of Gus as a ‘natural genius’ with psychic-like abilities, but who never speaks. In an interview, Stoppard told me: [Gus] is about as far as I’m prepared to go into metaphysics, I suppose. By which I mean, intellectually or temperamentally – I don’t know which it is – I don’t believe in a mechanistic universe. I don’t think that’s a complete description. So Gus represents, I suppose, my feeling that there is something more mysterious than that. And we don’t know how it works, and there’s no point in my explaining Gus because that would say I do know how it works. But in the first place, I don’t know how it works; in the second place I don’t think anybody does know; in the third place I don’t think it’s possible to know; in the fourth place I don’t think it’s necessary to know. It’s that kind of feeling. (Fleming, 1993: 23) In Jumpers, Stoppard’s moral philosopher George Moore declares, ‘there is more in [humans] than meets the microscope’ (Stoppard, 1972: 68), and Gus seems to be an embodiment of that metaphysical belief, of the ‘mystery in the clockwork’ (Stoppard, 1972: 72).

Thomasina

Thomasina, who we see between the ages of 13 and 16, is a vibrant, engaging personality with a thirst for knowledge; she also develops a percolating sexuality. The scenes between her and Septimus form the thematic and emotional heart of the scenes set in the past. As the daughter of an aristocrat, Thomasina receives a private education with her own in-home tutor, Septimus Hodge. It is a classical education of Latin, math, science and art (both music lessons and drawing lessons). Thomasina is a young woman of uncommon genius, but she is precocious not arrogant as she makes claims for

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the fruits of her intellectual gifts. She has an inquisitive mind and cleverly outwits her elders when she needs to do so. In some measure, Thomasina is typical of an adolescent sensibility, as her mind freely flows from curiosity about sex to queries about dinner to seemingly random observations about what happens when you stir your rice pudding. Her belief that Fermat was joking about having a proof for his last theorem and her drawing in a hermit on one of Mr Noakes’s designs also shows her playful side. At various points, she also exhibits frustration, tenderness, wit, intuitive insight, and bold initiative in her dealings with Septimus. For three years he is ‘her sparring partner in mental activity – the most exciting part of her life’, and by the final scene she has fallen in love with him (Hunter, 2000: 185–186). Overall, Thomasina is a multi-dimensional character who fully blossoms into a tantalizing young woman in the final scene. While some critics see Thomasina as being inspired by Byron’s daughter Ada, a brilliant young woman who helped develop the precursor to the modern computer, Stoppard has never mentioned any conscious attempt at such a deliberate parallel. Instead, he stresses the dramaturgical value of her youthfulness: ‘If you’re in a situation where you’re trying to teach an audience something, then to have somebody young who has to be taught, it takes the curse of this expository feeling you might get in the scene’ (Fleming, 1993: 22). The added value is that the passage of time covers the period of her sexual awakening, and so while she has a brilliant mind in both 1809 and 1812, the challenge for the actress is to be believable as both the precocious thirteen-year-old and later an older adolescent with a developing awareness of her sexuality.

Septimus

Septimus Hodge is a young man who lives at the Croom Estate, serving variously as Thomasina’s tutor, Lady Croom’s lover and ultimately the Sidley Park hermit. Though a year or two older,

Analysis and Commentary 43

Septimus was Byron’s friend at Cambridge’s Trinity College. In some measure, he is the on-stage manifestation of Byron, only of more limited means and social position. Like Byron, Septimus (originally played by the Byronic looking actor Rufus Sewell) has a smouldering sexuality to him, as well as a keen mind and a sharp wit. Though not of nobility, he moves easily in their social circles and carries himself with apt deportment. He displays bravado to Mr Chater and sly deference to his employer Lady Croom. Though he has a brief affair with Mrs Chater, his heart (for reasons not readily apparent) is set on Lady Croom. For him, it is love, evidenced by his jealousy at her affair with Count Zelinsky and by his refusal to accept Thomasina’s tempting offer to consummate a relationship. This rejection of a sexual tryst is a rather un-Byronic gesture, part of the ‘instinctive moral decency’ of his character (Hunter, 2000: 186). Septimus shares an intellectual and emotional bond with his pupil Thomasina as his tutoring also includes a subtle education on life and the ways of the world. He treads lightly when explaining sex to Thomasina, and her younger brother, while also becoming increasingly intrigued by his pupil’s intellectual ponderings. After her death, he devotes his remaining life to diligent pursuit of understanding Thomasina’s intuition of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its intimation that the universe is doomed to a slow, gradual ‘heat death’ (Highfield, 1993). Thomasina’s tragic death in the fire is amplified by Septimus’s fate. The critic Jim Hunter comments: ‘The youthful, elegant and gifted product of the Enlightenment is transformed to a lunatic hermit, “twenty years without discourse or companion” (64), and dies aged forty-seven, “hoary as Job and meagre as a cabbage-stalk” (65), a figure of Gothic gloom and extremity’ (Hunter, 2000: 187). Overall, Septimus stands as the pillar at the centre of the past scenes with his amorous adventures fuelling the plot machinations of duels and departures while the interactions with his pupil feed the play’s intellectual, emotional and thematic foundations.

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Other past characters

Lady Croom is the lady of the manor with a sweeping regal air. She is a colourful character cut from the cloth of a Mrs Malaprop or a Lady Bracknell. Lady Croom speaks in the epigrammatic style of her dramatic predecessors: ‘Do not dabble in paradox, Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit’ (11). Due to the force of her personality and her social position, she always controls the room, as she tells one guest: ‘The Castle of Otranto was written by whomsoever I say it was, otherwise what is the point of being a guest or having one?’ (13). Perhaps emblematic of the times, hers seems to be a marriage of convenience (as evidenced from affairs with Septimus, Count Zelinsky and an attempted tryst with Lord Byron), rather than love. Likewise, her bon mot regarding her daughter Thomasina – ‘We must have you married before you are educated beyond eligibility’ (84) – carries a ring of social truth regarding the expectations for women of that era. Ezra Chater is a minor poet married to a promiscuous wife. His blustery, buffoonish nature is aimed at laughs rather than verisimilitude. He is like the runt of the litter as other characters easily dominate, bearing him little respect. Captain Brice speaks casually of Chater’s impending death should a duel be fought, while Septimus directly notes the looseness of his wife’s reputation: ‘She is the epitome of all the qualities society applauds in her sex – and yet her chief renown is for a readiness that keeps her in a state of tropical humidity as would grow orchids in her drawers in January’ (7). At the same time, there should be a naive charm to him, including the ease with which he is swayed by Septimus’s praise for his poetry and his ridiculous attempt to turn his wife’s affair with Septimus into a virtuous act on her husband’s behalf. In short, he is a loveable loser who flails blindly onward in the misguided hope that he shall one day be regarded as a literary legend. While the audience knows otherwise, the words he speaks are true to him; the

Analysis and Commentary 45

comedy comes from the incongruity between his words (and self-image) and what the audience knows to be reality. Captain Brice is Lady Croom’s brother and is a member of the Royal Navy. He always stands in support of Mr Chater – paying for his poems to be published, serving as his second for a prospective duel, and hiring him as a botanist – but all that is simply so he can be near Mrs Chater, his mistress and future wife. Brice is the least sophisticated character and has a stiff bearing to him. He sees no sense of irony in his declaration: ‘As her tutor you have a duty to keep her in ignorance’ (11). Mr Noakes is a middle-aged landscape architect, who Stoppard loosely links to two legendary English landscape architects: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1715–1783) and Humphrey Repton (1752–1818). Since Lady Croom is deeply opposed to Noakes’s plans for transforming the family garden he must continually defend his plans for the new Gothic style of untamed nature and ‘ruins where there was never a house’ (12). His role is brief but believable, as his presence aids the audience’s understanding of the different aesthetics of classical and romantic gardens. Jellaby is a middle-aged butler. He has the prim and properness of a traditional stage butler, coupled with a willingness to reveal the latest gossip for the right price. Augustus is the energetic fifteen-year-old brother who loves to needle his older sister Thomasina. While he may boast about drawing naked women (77), he is actually rather ignorant and embarrassed by ‘carnal things’ (88). He only appears in the final scene.

Influences and genre

Arcadia is a comedy of ideas that requires a delicate balance between the past and the present. The nineteenth-century scenes are written in a style reminiscent of the epigrammatic wit of Richard Brinsley

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Sheridan and Oscar Wilde. They need to be performed with that sense of period style. In contrast, the present-day scenes are played in a mode of contemporary realism. The past scenes are set in the era when Romanticism was taking root and flowering in England. In particular the shadow of Lord Byron (1788–1824) looms over those scenes. The first three scenes set in the past correspond to Byron’s first success, his satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a work aimed at exacting vengeance on those who, writing in the Edinburgh Review, had criticized his work. The popularity of the piece led to subsequent, larger editions, where he critiqued other authors and critics, as well as prominent people such as Lord Holland. As noted in Arcadia, during the summer of 1809 Byron did indeed leave England amidst mysterious circumstances. The other past scenes correspond to the publication of the first two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), the work that made Byron famous. Some say Byron invented the modern notion of celebrity, and in 1812, he was the centre of public attention, partly due to his very open affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. In addition to Byron and Lamb, the nineteenth-century characters are influenced by the effects of the Gothic literature that began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). These works’ emphases on a mysterious mood and extreme emotion helped usher in the evolution of the English garden away from the order and refinement of Neoclassicism and towards a ‘picturesque’ style that often included imitation ruins and other features designed to evoke a haunting atmosphere. While Stoppard has never publicly mentioned any artistic antecedents for Arcadia, in his 2002 biography Ira Nadel cites four possible influences on Arcadia: Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Headlong Hall (1816), Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread Prize-winning novel The Chymical Wedding (1989), Louise Page’s play Adam was a Gardener (1991) and A. S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel Possession (1990). While there are some stylistic parallels (most notably the alteration between past and present) between Stoppard’s

Analysis and Commentary 47

play and the work of Page and Clarke, there is no direct evidence of influence on Arcadia or of Stoppard’s knowledge of them. Stoppard does mention Thomas Love Peacock and Headlong Hall in the play (26), but even then the influence comes from a disparate collection of writers, scientists and landscape architects gathering at a country estate where an English garden is undergoing a transformation similar to that of the Croom estate. On the other hand, Nadel argues: ‘The plot and structure of Arcadia owe much to [Possession] . . . It is no surprise to learn that Stoppard told Byatt he had pinched the plot of Arcadia from her novel’ (Nadel, 2002: 429–430). Since Stoppard struggles with formulating plots, it is indeed possible that he turned to Byatt and Peacock for inspiration in crafting the structure to hold the heady brew of intellectual ideas he sought to inject into Arcadia. While seeking parallels between artistic works can be an intriguing endeavour, in the case of Arcadia, which does not rely on pastiche the way in which Rosencrantz and Travesties do, it is more insightful to examine Stoppard’s own declarations of its origins. For Stoppard, plays begin with ideas, and since he revels in complexity, Stoppard refers to a play’s creation as the coalescing of different ideas: ‘What happens is you pull in all sorts of ideas which previously had been quite disconnected, which had been floating around in one’s mind for years, . . . As usual I found that one has a play to write at the point where different threads, quite separate threads, begin to join up’ (Fleming, 1993: 19). For Arcadia, the threads lay in two different realms of Stoppard’s reading. As discussed in Chapter 1 Arcadia is part of the turn-of-the-millennium embrace of science as dramatic source material. In many ways, the keys to understanding the play lie in understanding the science that intrigued Stoppard. In a profile piece, friend and actor John Wood says: When I first met [Tom] in the sixties, there was a kind of anarchic joy in him, and it’s still there, but it contains its own

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impossibility now. I can’t say that life has disappointed Tom, but I think he once thought there must be a system behind the absurdity, and he found out there isn’t. (Schiff, 1989: 224) The article proceeds to mention that Stoppard had just finished reading James Gleick’s Chaos: The Making of A New Science (1987), and knew that this could be the seed of a new play. Chaos theory attempts to systemize that which appears to function outside of any system. It describes a world in which there is chaos in order, but also order in chaos. Stoppard comments: ‘[Chaos mathematics is] a reconciliation between the idea of things not being random on the one hand and yet unpredictable on the other hand’ (Fleming, 1993: 19). Elsewhere, he elaborated on the thematic appeal of the new science: [Chaos mathematics] suggested itself as a quite interesting and powerful metaphor for human behaviour, not just behaviour, but about the way it suggested a determined life, a life ruled by determinism, and a life which is subject simply to random causes and effects. Those two ideas about life were not irreconcilable. Chaos mathematics is precisely to do with the unpredictability of determinism. (Gussow, 1995: 84) The non-hierarchical reconciliation of seeming opposites stands at the core of chaos theory and its description of the physical world. This combination of apparent randomness yet underlying order epitomizes the structure of many of Stoppard’s plays and meshes with his worldview in which there is a high degree of relativity yet also moral absolutes. ‘Chaos theory’ can be a daunting term, and Stoppard himself did not rely solely on books for his information. He discussed the topic with his son Oliver who was studying physics for his doctorate, and consulted Robert May, a prominent Oxford chaotician

Analysis and Commentary 49

in population biology. For the London production, May taught the cast the basic concepts of this new science. In New York, Stoppard served that function. The term ‘chaos theory’ has entered the lexicon, but it is an imprecise and misleading phrase. It is imprecise because under its umbrella are a diverse range of fields that utilize and concentrate on different aspects and applications of the paradigm. More significantly, the term ‘chaos’ is misleading as it connotatively privileges the unpredictable aspect of the paradigm. Science writer David Porusch states that the ‘proper name is “deterministic chaos”’ (Porusch, 1990: 438), a phrasing that more strongly conveys that it is a both/and paradigm in which the terms are interrelated in a nonhierarchical manner. My treatment of deterministic chaos is based on James Gleick’s interpretation of the theory, the account Stoppard used to inform his play. Deterministic chaos is a hybrid of mathematics and science that describes dynamical systems (any general field of action/behaviour). Newton’s classical mechanics describe an orderly world. Systems operate via clear-cut cause-to-effect mechanisms, and there is inevitable determinism; given enough information, one can predict future events. However, this traditional view of the natural world has proven to be incomplete. Scientists now believe that the greater part of nature follows the rules of deterministic chaos. Though determined by equations that are understood, natural systems such as the weather, population growth systems and heartbeat patterns behave in ways that cannot be predicted. Thus, simple equations can create complex patterns. Variations are partly due to ‘the butterfly effect’, a term that means dynamical systems have a sensitive dependence on initial conditions; seemingly minor changes in input (e.g. rounding the number .506127 to .506) can cause major variations in outcome. The behaviour of these systems cannot be strictly predicted; however, the equations that govern such systems follow universal mathematical laws. Gleick asserts that one of the

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most important aspects of deterministic chaos is that ‘the laws of complexity hold universally, caring not at all for the details of a system’s constituent atoms’ (Gleick, 1987: 304). Perhaps this paradox of being highly sensitive to local conditions while also participating in a universal pattern was part of the metaphoric appeal to Stoppard. Deterministic chaos deals with systems of unpredictable determinism, but the uncertainty does not result in pure randomness but rather in complex patterns. Traditionally, scientists expected dynamical systems to settle into stable, predictable behaviour. However, deterministic chaos has shown that as many of these systems respond to variations in input, the graph of their behaviour ‘bifurcates and creates an oscillation pattern between two “steady states.” If increases continue, the bifurcated patterns would themselves bifurcate, and then the four would also bifurcate, ad infinitum, into a condition of true chaotic randomness’ (Demastes, 1994b: 246). Surprisingly, within these random states, windows of order reappear: A new steady state develop[s], a self-similar though downscaled replication of the primary pattern; and within these replications, even further downscaled replications reoccur, again and again. There is order in chaos – an unpredictable order, but a determined order nonetheless and not merely random behaviour. (Demastes, 1994b: 246) As will be discussed, this bifurcation process influenced Stoppard’s construction of the script. Deterministic chaos is only part of the science that informs Arcadia. Other concepts include entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the irreversibility of time, iterated algorithms, fractals, scaling and population biology. Entropy is a measure of the randomness or disorder of a system. The law of increase of

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entropy states that as a whole the universe is evolving from order to disorder. This relates to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that heat can flow in only one direction, from hotter to colder. Since these equations, unlike Newton’s laws of motion, do not go backwards and forwards, there is an ‘arrow of time’ that points towards the eventual ‘heat death’ of the universe. The terms iteration, fractals and scaling will be discussed in relation to specific features of Arcadia. Overall, Stoppard covers a shift in the scientific paradigm from the mechanical, predictable universe described by Newton to the unpredictable determinism described by deterministic chaos. Significantly, Stoppard accents those aspects of deterministic chaos that show there is underlying order to seemingly random events. While Stoppard saw deterministic chaos as a rich metaphor, he felt it was ‘too abstract and unmanageable’ on its own (Hickling, 1993). The other starting point of Arcadia came after reading Gleick’s book, when Stoppard was browsing a friend’s bookcase: I was thinking about Romanticism and Classicism as opposites in style, taste, temperament, art . . . Saying [to my friend] there’s a play, isn’t there, about the way that retrospectively one looks at poetry, painting, gardening and speaks of classical periods and the romantic revolution, . . . [And then] one starts dividing people up into classical temperaments and romantic temperaments – and I suppose it’s not that far from Hapgood in a way. The romantic temperament has a classical person wildly signalling, and vice versa. (Gussow, 1995: 90) Stoppard admits that the final text ‘says very [little] about these two sides of the human personality or temperament. I don’t think it’s in the play. It’s by no means in the foreground. And yet, it’s firing all around the target, making a pattern around the target’ (Gussow, 1995: 91). The yoking of the differences between Classicism and

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Romanticism (as manifested in the evolution of landscape gardening) to deterministic chaos provided a recognizable parallel to describe the shifting scientific paradigm. Once Stoppard latched onto the idea of having scholars investigating past events, the form of Arcadia came into shape, and once settled upon, varied very little. Deterministic chaos is grounded in non-linear mathematics, and appropriately Stoppard constructs Arcadia in a non-linear manner with the scenes alternating between the early 1800s and the present. When I asked Stoppard what led to the decision to intermingle the two time periods in the final scene, he gave both a practical and a thematic answer. On the one hand it was ‘just to change the deck’ so that ‘just at the point when the audience thinks it can guess what’s coming next, you have to fool them’ (Fleming, 1993: 23). When pressed further on the topic, Stoppard added: ‘I have a secret agenda, but I wouldn’t lay it on the audience. The play mimics the way an algorithm goes through bifurcations into chaos, as a matter of fact. In a very compressed way’ (Fleming, 1993: 24). Elsewhere, he added: ‘The play bifurcates two or three times and then goes into the last section which is all mixed up. So, it’s very chaos structured’ (Demastes and Kelly, 1994a: 5). Thus, as in keeping with the strongest of science plays, the form and content wed as the very structure of the play not only embodies the spirit of deterministic chaos but also creates a very crude diagram of bifurcation into chaos. The non-linear bouncing between time periods suggests disorder, yet lurking underneath is a tightly ordered dramatic structure. There are seven scenes – three in the past, three in the present, and the chaotic seventh scene where the periods mix. Within that scene there are six sub-scenes: two of only the past, two of only the present and two where the different periods share the stage. Thus, as with chaotic systems in the physical world, there are a series of bifurcations and even within the chaotic region, there are pockets of

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order, and so overall, this non-linear play exhibits a fine, underlying structure. Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal, which from the Latin means ‘irregular’. However, in practice, fractal, above all, means self-similar. Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, a pattern inside of pattern – a trait typical of Stoppard’s dramaturgy. As science writer Roger Highfield states, fractal geometry describes the ‘messy bits and behaviour of the real world. Clouds, lungs, mountain ranges, and cauliflowers are fractal objects, ones that reveal similar shapes and motifs at every level of magnification’ (Highfield, 1993). The self-similarity of fractal construction is abundant in nature and abundant in the text of Arcadia. Selfsimilarity of dialogue, situations, characters, props, costumes and musical accompaniment are present in the play; indeed, it is the aspect of deterministic chaos that Stoppard uses most frequently. At one point, the present-day characters dress in Regency clothes, creating a costuming similarity to the characters from the past. In one of the most complete forms of self-similarity, the same actor plays Gus and Augustus and ends the play wearing the same costume for both characters; only the context reveals whom the audience is seeing. As science writer James Gleick explains, this similarity across scales is significant because in dynamical systems it signifies that some quality is preserved while everything else changes: ‘some regularity lay beneath the turbulent surface’ (Gleick, 1987: 172). Metaphorically, it suggests that Stoppard is more interested in looking at, or looking for, similarities beneath external differences.

Close reading of key scenes

Scene One While Stoppard had weighty intellectual matters he wished to explore in Arcadia, he has also always stressed that for him theatre is primarily a form of entertainment. Described as a writer of ‘serious

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fun’ Stoppard is aware that a playwright typically sets the play’s desired tone at its very opening; for a comedy that means there should be jokes and laughs on the very first page of the text. Likewise, keeping with the tradition of narrative-based plays, Arcadia’s opening scene is also used to establish the play’s exposition. Before introducing the scientific and artistic themes, Stoppard begins Arcadia with a comical exchange that embodies the human dimensions of the play’s intellectual conceits. The play opens in the stately elegance of an airy room on an English country estate with two characters clothed in period dress. The appearance of books and two individuals writing suggests a serious or subdued tone. In the opening moments as the audience views these two figures silently working, they are not sure what to expect, least of all the play’s opening exchange. THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace? SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef. (1) The ensuing explanation of the Latin roots of ‘carnal embrace’ provides not only amusing comedy, but also delicately weaves in the first major plot point: Mrs Chater’s having been caught in carnal embrace in the gazebo. In other words, her affair with Septimus is about to become public knowledge. The comedy and the dynamics of the scene rest on the tension between Thomasina’s innocent naiveté and Septimus’s wary attempts to learn what is and is not known without revealing too much to Thomasina. Thomasina eventually sees through Septimus’s punning evasions and wants to know ‘the true meaning of things’ (3), and thus is told: ‘Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure’ (3). This clinical definition removes the

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mystery and intimacy of human sexual relations, and in the process seems incomplete. It is a motif that runs throughout the play. Whenever the characters try to fix and understand reality, whether it is through the use of language, through the use of narratives designed to control and explain their experiences, or through the study of science, they discover that life is not so easily confined and defined. At the same time Stoppard suggests these deeper meanings, he also inserts a steady flow of jokes, and so the section on carnal embrace closes with an answer to the question of whether sexual congress is the same as love: ‘Oh no, it is much nicer than that’ (4). Having established sexual imbroglios and comedy as core components, Stoppard moves the opening scene into thematic realms. Science has long been a way in which humans have sought to understand the world around them, and in the opening scene Thomasina is studying Newtonian science and Euclidian geometry, modes of thought that see the world as linear, stable and ordered. In human terms, Newton and his classical laws of motion seem to leave no room for unpredictability and free will. In the first scene, Thomasina explains the ramifications of what would happen if everything behaved according to Newton’s laws of motion: If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. (5) Though not noted in the play, Thomasina’s quotation is a paraphrase from a statement made by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749– 1827), an astronomer and mathematician known as the Isaac Newton of France. Laplace believed in causal determinism, and in the 1800s Newton’s classical mechanics did indeed suggest a

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deterministic, mechanical universe; it is one of strict order, regularity and predictability. While the play begins in a time where Newton’s understanding of the world dominates, Thomasina has already begun to intuit that this view of the universe is incomplete. She says: ‘When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again’ (4–5). Her seemingly simple observation points to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the increasing disorder in the universe. Since Stoppard decided that the story element needed to drive Arcadia, the initial presentation of the play’s science ideas is brief and followed by a shift to the plot dynamics of the potential duel between Septimus and Chater. Notably, the exchange ends with a complete reversal, as Chater abandons his calls for a duel and instead expresses his gratitude to Septimus, with the audience recognizing that Chater’s dedication – to a man ‘who stood up and gave his best on behalf of the Author’ (9) – is also an unwitting allusion to Septimus’s ‘perpendicular poke’ of Chater’s wife (7). The continual interweaving of plot, comedy and thematic content is evident in the next unit as Lady Croom and her entourage sweep into the room. While there is some brilliant cross-talk and clever wordplay in this unit, deeper implications lay in some unstated parallels Stoppard employs. Since comprehending scientific concepts can sometimes be difficult, Stoppard aids his audience’s understanding by paralleling the shift in the scientific paradigm to the analogous transition from Classicism to Romanticism. Here, Classicism metaphorically corresponds to Newtonian science and Romanticism to deterministic chaos. In the play, these artistic movements are embodied in the landscape gardening of the Croom family home. As explained by Hannah in Scene Two (27), until the mid-1700s the garden adhered to the classical aesthetics of symmetry, geometrical regularity

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and formal simplicity; however, this arrangement was replaced by Capability Brown’s asymmetrical style. Lady Croom describes her garden as having ‘trees companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage’ and ‘meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged – in short it is nature as God intended’ (12). But in the first scene the audience learns that the garden is undergoing yet another alteration, as landscape gardener Mr Noakes is transforming it into a Romantic wilderness, the ‘picturesque’, Gothic style of untamed nature. Noakes is referred to as ‘The Emperor of Irregularity’ (85) because one of his chief stylistic principles is ‘irregularity’ (12). These gardens, like the scientific paradigms they parallel, offer competing views for what is the ‘true’ nature of the world. Just as the garden moves from regulated order to irregularity, so too has science’s view of how nature constructs itself. Issues relating to irregularity are expanded on in Scenes Three and Four. The opening scene also contains the one reference to the play’s title. Due to Virgil’s Eclogues (c. 38B. C.) the word ‘Arcadia’ connotes an idyllic countryside or rustic paradise, but Stoppard has additional nuances in mind. Lady Croom’s description of her garden concludes: ‘In short, it is nature as God intended, and I can say with the painter, Et in Arcadia ego! “Here I am in Arcadia,” Thomasina’ (12). The reference is to Nicolas Poussin’s painting The Shepherds of Arcadia (also known as Et in Arcadia Ego, first version produced c. 1630, and second version 1638), a work in which shepherds puzzle over the meaning of a tomb’s Latin inscription. Lady Croom gives the common (mis)translation, while art historian Kevin Jackson states that the phrase, in part deriving from Guercino’s earlier rendition of the theme (another Et in Arcadia Ego painted between 1618 and 1622), ‘ought properly to be translated “Even in Arcadia, I, Death, hold sway”’ (1993, 15). Indeed, Stoppard claims to have originally wanted to call the play Et in Arcadia ego because he ‘wanted the presence of death in the

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title, but brevity and box office sense prevailed’ (Nadel, 2002: 431). In the play, Septimus and Thomasina recognize the grimmer translation that death is ever-present, and notably they are the two promising lives cut short, the good-hearted people who die amidst the Arcadia crafted out of the English countryside. Stoppard has frequently referred to theatre as an event not a text, noting that many of theatre’s most magical moments are matters of staging, not of dialogue. The transition from Scene One to Scene Two has that potential, and though not explicit in the published stage directions, many directors carefully choreograph this first shift in time. As the lights dim and music rises, Septimus exits by one door as Hannah enters by another. The audience sees a nineteenth-century character exit and a modern character enter, and yet each appears completely comfortable in the space they inhabit. The elegant juxtaposition of different centuries is a theatrical, not cinematic, effect as the audience comes to realize that the stage setting has stayed the same while time has moved on nearly two hundred years. Scene Three While Scene Three develops the potential duel between Septimus and Mr Chater and enhances the dynamics between Septimus and Thomasina, it also engages with two thematic points. The first revolves around human knowledge and the ravages of time. In a merging of ideas and emotion Thomasina tearfully laments the burning of the library at Alexandria, the greatest depository of texts in the classical world, including hundreds of Greek plays and ‘Aristotle’s own library’ (38). To console her and to answer her closing query, ‘How can we sleep for grief?’ (38), Septimus responds: By counting our stock. Seven plays by Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! . . . We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The

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procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. (38) Michael Billington called this scene ‘the real heart of the play’ with Septimus’s point being ‘that mankind continually renews itself and that ideas never die’ (Billington, 1993b). The speech is intriguing in its mixed imagery as the march towards death is a largely linear image, while there is also the suggestion of the circularity of life and history as items are picked up and rediscovered. In the self-contained world of the play, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy as Thomasina intuits maths that will indeed be realized in later centuries. However, in the real world, Septimus’s optimism is not so valid; the lost plays of the Greeks will likely never be fully recovered. When I asked Stoppard about this particular speech, he admitted that he did not share his character’s optimism: As a matter of fact, I don’t feel [the way Septimus does]. Over the years I’ve wasted grief on what’s lost. I don’t really comfort myself with the thought, ‘Well we’ve got nineteen Euripides plays, what does it matter about the other eighty?’ It matters; it seems to matter a lot. And I don’t really believe that somebody else will write them again, but I think it’s a valid correction Septimus makes in the sense that one has to accept the world as it is and not the world as it could have been. You operate from what you have. (Fleming, 1993: 22) Stoppard’s stated views are not directly in the play, but rather the speech functions as a moment where Septimus comforts his pupil as they both share a love for human knowledge. Likewise, while

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one can agree and disagree with individual points of Septimus’s argument, the speech as a whole feeds into the larger exploration of the human pursuit for understanding and intellectual progress, topics more fully explored in Scene Five. The other thematic thread of Scene Three helps illustrate the way each of the scenes is woven together. The apple that Gus gives Hannah at the end of Scene Two is supposed to contain a couple of leaves. ‘The same apple from all appearances’ (35) is then used by Septimus in Scene Three, with Thomasina taking one of the leaves, and declaring: ‘I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation’ (37). What she starts to do in her attempt to map out how ‘nature is written in numbers’ (37) is then explained in Scene Four. Scene Four The scene opens with Hannah reading from Thomasina’s maths primer, including her declaration that she has discovered a ‘New Geometry of Irregular Forms’ (43), an idea that includes a prescient sense that irregularity is the organizing principle of nature. At the same time, Thomasina’s attempt to draw objects in nature through number alone (43) is a metaphorical statement – the iteration of her equation could produce a picture of a leaf, but not a leaf itself. As Hannah seeks to understand the meaning of Thomasina’s writing, the play moves into its most overt articulation of principles associated with deterministic chaos. Thus, Scene Four is the intellectual crux of the play, and Hannah is placed in the same position as the audience while the modern-day chaotician, Valentine, explains everything to her. Valentine begins by explaining iteration and its significance. Iteration is a mathematical process that was first used in the early 1970s, and it is a feedback loop in which you take the solution of an equation and plug it back into the equation and solve it again, and then continually repeat the process; the advent of the electronic calculator made the process infinitely faster than it would have been in the 1800s (44, 51). Until the twentieth

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century mathematics were classical, but Valentine explains: ‘Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world’ (45). Deterministic chaos has shown that irregularity is one of the building blocks of life. Linking the two periods together is the fact that while Thomasina’s theory prefigures fractal geometry, Valentine is actually using this iteration process in his study of population changes in biology. He proceeds to explain one of the fascinating features of these algorithms: The details change, you can’t keep tabs on everything, it’s not nature in a box. But it isn’t necessary to know the details. When they are all put together, it turns out the population is obeying a mathematical rule. . . . It’s not about the behaviour of fish. It’s about the behaviour of numbers. This thing works for any phenomenon which eats its own numbers – measles epidemics, rainfall averages, cotton prices, it’s a natural phenomenon in itself. Spooky. (45–46) Here, one sees the paradoxical quality of deterministic chaos – individual dynamic systems are highly sensitive to local conditions, yet they also participate in a universal pattern. The metaphoric implications of Stoppard’s use of the new science reveal much about his personal perspective and predisposition. In an article on chaos theory and theatre, Michael Vanden Heuvel argues that many contemporary theorists and artists looking at quantum physics and deterministic chaos, as well as post-structuralist theories of language, embrace the idea that since prediction has given way to probability, the defining features of the world are indeterminacy, uncertainty, disorder and chance (Vanden Heuvel, 1993: 255). In contrast, while still acknowledging unpredictability, Stoppard

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focuses on what is stable and ordered. Science writers John Briggs and F David Peat discuss chaos theory by using a metaphor of a turbulent mirror with one side of the mirror being concerned with the move from order to chaos and the other side the move from chaos to order. In crafting Arcadia, Stoppard has emphasized the ideas that correspond to the mirror itself and those aspects that mark the move from chaos to order. In short, Stoppard stresses the process of recognizing order within disorder, seeing the fine structure hidden within the seemingly random. As Scene Four progresses, one sees that between the poles of universal laws and indeterminacy, science is offering a new way of understanding the world. In a sublimely passionate speech, Valentine explains: The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s how nature creates itself on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to wipe out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small . . . The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about . . . these things are full of mystery . . . We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different . . . [and] the smallest variation blows prediction apart . . . The future is disorder . . . It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. (47–48) Hannah challenges him: ‘The weather is fairly predictable in the Sahara’ (48). Noting that there used to be corn in Egypt, Valentine responds: ‘The scale is different but the graph goes up and down the same way. Six thousand years in the Sahara looks like six months

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in Manchester, I bet you’ (48). Two very different phenomena are shown to have an underlying similarity when viewed from an alternative perspective. So perspective does play a role in understanding the world, but order among chaos, similarities amidst differences, those are the realms that Stoppard accents in this play. Characteristic of deterministic chaos being a both/and paradigm, Stoppard’s emphasis on those regions of order and stability is balanced with a healthy celebration of uncertainty. Valentine is genuinely pleased that the old scientific foundation has crumbled and that there are still many mysteries that may never be solved. Indeed, the play as a whole acknowledges the difficulty of truly knowing anything. In Scene Seven Hannah offers the sobering perspective: ‘It can’t prove to be true, it can only not prove to be false yet’ (74). Scene Five Since Scene Five occurs after the audience returns from intermission, a second consecutive present-day scene does not offend the symmetry of alternating time periods. While the first half of Scene Five is devoted to the rhetorical flourishes of Bernard’s sensational paper ‘proving’ Byron killed Chater in a duel, the second half carries the thematic weight of the scene. Notably it is the characters’ emotions that fuel the intellectual exchange. When Hannah and Valentine do not give Bernard due praise, he turns on them. He sharply criticizes Hannah and her book on Caroline Lamb, and then launches into a passionate debate with Valentine over what is and is not worth knowing: VALENTINE: But it doesn’t matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress. Knowledge. . . . BERNARD: Why does scientific progress matter more than personalities? . . . Don’t confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent

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need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars – big bangs, black holes – who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? . . . I’d push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I’d lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through. (61) Stoppard notes that Bernard’s polemic against science is ‘a kind of performance art’ that ‘does not speak for me’ (Hawkes, 1993). Elsewhere, he adds that Bernard is not sincere about the tirade, that it is a form of recreation for him (Fleming, 1993: 23). While Bernard does not mean everything he says, the fiery exchange helps define the characters, and it articulates different approaches and conceptions of knowledge. Valentine takes an idealistic scientific approach in valuing knowledge itself; the ‘whats’ are more important than the ‘whos’. In other words, for Valentine it does not matter whether Leibniz or Newton first developed calculus, what matters is that calculus came into being (61). On the surface, it is an art versus science debate, but Stoppard is not seeking an either/or response. Stoppard clearly recognizes the value and contributions made by science, and he has repeatedly stated his belief that art ‘is important because it provides the moral matrix, the moral sensibility, from which we make our judgments about the world’ (Hudson, 1974: 66). Instead of choosing between the two, the play champions the contributions made by both the arts and the sciences. While Bernard’s diatribe is colourfully hyperbolic, it also recognizes the modern phenomenon of the commercialization of knowledge (the sciences get the status and money that the humanities do not). Although he is driven by a desire for money and fame, Bernard follows up his diatribe with a powerful

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argument for the value of the liberal arts: ‘If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? . . . Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you’ (61). He proceeds to recite the opening lines from Byron’s poem ‘She Walks In Beauty.’ While science focuses on the physical universe, Bernard offers an eloquent articulation of how art affects one’s personal universe. In contrast to his reasons for pursuing the Byron story, here, Bernard takes a knowledge-for-knowledge’s sake approach as he stresses how knowledge, particularly that gained from art, has value for its abstract ability to enrich human life on a non-utilitarian basis. Scene Seven Not counting intermission, Arcadia runs for about two hours and forty-five minutes, with Scene Seven occupying those last forty-five minutes; in it, the ideas of the play are manifested in human terms, as the richness and complexity of Stoppard’s characters, themes and dramatic structure coalesce. It is a scene rich with imagery, many revolving around heat. Steam engines, thermodynamics, sexual passion and candles all enter into this final scene. To varying degrees, the moments that involve these items or ideas involve construction or destruction as they can be either life affirming or life denying. Typical of Stoppard’s both/and worldview, the very end of the play is a mixture of the two, as the audience’s knowledge of a Thomasina’s impending death is preceded by the dance of life. At the beginning of this ‘chaotic’ scene, Stoppard employs selfsimilarity in costume and dialogue as the contemporary characters are dressed in Regency clothes, and there is a textual echo from the first scene as once again a teenage woman asks an older male: ‘Do you think I’m the first person to think of this?’ (73). The question again revolves around a deterministic universe, with Chloë positing that the world tries to be deterministic ‘but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that

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part of the plan’ (73). Valentine adds: ‘Ah. The attraction Newton left out. All the way back to the apple in the garden’ (74). Stoppard uses wordplay to link science (Newton’s gravitational attraction as well as an allusion to chaos theory’s ‘strange attractors’ that help govern turbulent systems) and sexual attraction. In addition to being a good joke, it suggests the way unplanned sexual attractions (such as an extra-marital affair) can disrupt a stable system. Its invocation of the recurrent apple is not only Newton’s apple, but also harks back to the sexist and moralistic interpretation of the Genesis story of the Fall, that it was a sexual sin that led to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the Biblical Arcadia. Before resuming his consideration of the metaphoric link between sex and science, Stoppard pauses to include perhaps the play’s most thematically relevant speech. Hannah rebuffs another one of Valentine’s casual propositions, and then both sit working on their research. When Valentine is about to give up on his grouse project, Hannah offers encouragement. In a calm, but heartfelt speech Hannah articulates the fundamental humanness of the search for knowledge: It’s all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. . . . Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final. (75–76) The line ‘it’s wanting to know that makes us matter’ strikes to the heart of Stoppard’s humanism. In its depiction of people striving to understand the past and to find the keys that unlock the mysteries

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of nature, the play is a celebration of the human struggle to obtain knowledge, with meaning arriving as much out of the process as the product. Just as Valentine was invigorated by knowing that ‘almost everything you thought you knew is wrong’ (48), so, too, Hannah is not discouraged by the prospect of failure. Rather than despair, Stoppard embraces a cautious optimism and expresses a resounding belief in human agency rather than materialistic views of life. Right after Hannah’s speech, Valentine shows how his computer was able to complete the iteration that Thomasina had started. ‘The Coverly set’ (76), an iterated algorithm that produces the fractal image of a leaf, appears on Valentine’s computer screen. (It was also printed in the programme of the London production.) As he and Hannah look at the image, he says: ‘In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing. I can’t show you how deep it goes. Each picture is a detail of the previous one, blown up. And so on. Forever’ (76). It is another embrace of finding the pockets of order amidst a sea of chaos. Likewise, since Hannah ultimately succeeds in proving her theory and since Thomasina’s theories are shown to be accurate, Arcadia is an affirmation that despite all the indeterminacy, people can use their intellect and intuition to gain knowledge. It suggests the following: that science often works, that people can lead fulfilling lives, that even without all the answers, people can be happy and that interacting with uncertainty is part of what makes human life worth living. Or to paraphrase the theory, life can be chaotic, but also stable, and within chaos there are windows of order. As the scene progresses Stoppard resumes his linking of sex and science. The double meaning of ‘the attraction Newton left out’ is extended when Thomasina explains that Newton’s determinism is indeed disproved by ‘the action of bodies in heat’ (84). While Thomasina explains the unidirectional flow of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that undermines the Newtonian worldview,

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Lady Croom makes clear the sexual entendre: ‘The Chater would overthrow the Newtonian system in a weekend’ (84). Typical of Stoppard, a stage effect reinforces the connection between ‘bodies in heat’ in physics and the same term as applied to erotic passion. The steady, droning beat of the Newcomen steam engine and the flirtatious piano music of Lady Croom and Count Zelinsky accompany the scene as Thomasina reads the French essay about how the heat equation does not follow Newton’s laws. The joke that sexual attraction is the attraction Newton left out and that bodies in heat negate determinism are part of Stoppard’s metaphorical conceit for the difficulty in mapping out individual destinies. Newton’s laws work when they operate in a vacuum – it is the friction of the real world that destroys predictability. Similarly, the multiple variables and contingencies of reality, including love and the heat of sexual passion, preclude predictable, deterministic lives. The richness of deterministic chaos as a metaphor for human life and interactions is its paradoxical quality. There is the sense of determinism, of the inability to control with whom one falls in love, yet the play also shows free will in action as Septimus decides not to consummate the relationship with his pupil. In Arcadia, the characters experience both determinism and unpredictability, both fate and free will. As the scene develops, the plot bifurcations move into a chaotic region as the characters from the different periods begin to share the stage. Again Stoppard theatrically utilizes self-similarity as, ‘doubled by time’, Septimus and Hannah turn the pages of Thomasina’s iteration (78). In Trevor Nunn’s staging, Hannah is positioned over Septimus’s shoulder, and they simultaneously turn one page, then another, then back one and forward one. This temporal recursion is not only aesthetically pleasing but also again suggests the notion that despite external differences some quality is preserved. While Hannah hopes that the science indicates that ‘the world is saved after all’, Valentine clarifies: ‘No, it is still doomed. But if this is

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how it started, perhaps it’s how the next one will come’ (78). Similarly, in the second chaotic region, after the second ‘doubled by time’ moment where Septimus and Valentine comprehend Thomasina’s diagram for heat exchange, Thomasina ‘cheerfully’ confirms Septimus’s conclusion that ‘we are all doomed’ (93). In both instances, the characters do not respond pessimistically, but rather remain accepting and hopeful. The close of the first chaotic region, before it bifurcates back into ordered regions of past and present, is a less obvious moment of the two periods interacting: at the same time that Lady Croom speaks about the Chaters and the dahlia, Hannah silently reads about it; this is the information that disproves Bernard’s theory. Thus from a region of disorder comes a new sense of order; Bernard gets his comeuppance. He is ‘fucked by a dahlia!’ (88), and Hannah gleefully sees to it that Bernard will get his just desserts. The reverseangle view is that Bernard’s life goes from order to disorder. His attempt at fame has gone dreadfully astray. Again, there is rich interaction between order and disorder, with the two seeming opposites working in conjunction to make things the way they are. As the last purely ordered region prepares to give way to the final bifurcation into chaos, the play moves towards its intellectual and emotional climax. A full moon glistening through the French windows, candlelight, and the soft strains of a piano create a richly, romantic mood as Thomasina, in a soft white nightdress, comes for her late-night waltz lesson. Nunn’s staging makes the sub-textual sexual tension evident as Thomasina drapes herself over Septimus’s chair and shoulder, nestling her face into his hair. He absentmindedly strokes her hand as he continues reading her essay on thermodynamics. But then Septimus’s sense of decorum surfaces, and he makes Thomasina sit at the other end of the table while they wait for music to which they can waltz. The move to chaos is then marked theatrically as the piano music gives way to more modern party music, and the pulsing, red flashes

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of fireworks appear through the windows. Amidst this romantic setting, there is the second moment of ‘doubled by time’, and even though the ‘universe must cease and grow cold’ (93), the characters remain happy, even celebratory – Valentine for the joy of scientific, intellectual understanding, and Thomasina for human contact, embodied in the ensuing waltz and kisses she shares with Septimus. Ultimately, the scientific and the human dimensions of the play are linked in the staging of the waltz. A waltz is emblematic of deterministic chaos in that there is a prescribed series of steps, but that ‘deterministic equation’ can still yield any number of patterns. In Nunn’s staging, Thomasina and Septimus’s waltz takes them on a few different paths through the room, at one point even dancing between Bernard and Chloë who are in the midst of their hasty and unplanned farewell – one scholar-young female couple is in-sync, one out-of-sync; one coupling is based solely on sex, while the other mixes sexual and intellectual attraction, but ultimately remains a platonic love as they never consummate their affection. Indeed, Thomasina invites Septimus to spend the night with her, but his final answer ‘I will not’ (96) is indicative of free will rather than strict determinism. However, the deterministic side of life is also acknowledged in this moment, for it is here that Septimus lights Thomasina’s candle, with the audience knowing that her fate is to die that very night in a fire. Her intuition about the heat death of the universe becomes painfully and poignantly personal. The dance of life ends in mortality, but it is still a happy dance. While Thomasina and Septimus enjoy their final waltz, Gus, identical in appearance to Augustus, enters. This use of self-similar costuming disrupts customary markers of order as for a moment there is no telling which character is on stage. But Gus soon proves to be a bearer of order, for he provides Hannah with the evidence she needs to prove her theory, a theory that she instinctively knew was correct, but for which she now has the logical proof.

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In gratitude for this intellectual assistance, Hannah shows her human side by agreeing to dance with Gus. Their waltz is clumsy, and nowhere near as fluid as the other dancing couple, but as music from both periods is heard, the moonlight and candlelight are joined by a lush, purplish glow that bathes the dancing couples. It is a beautifully, moving finale as these ‘bodies in motion’ celebrate both the human intellect and the human heart. By the end of the play all the major distinctions – classical-romantic, Newtonianchaotic, order-disorder, intuition-logic, heart-mind – have interpenetrated each other, showing that the co-existence and interdependency of these seeming opposites is fundamental to the way the world, life and humans operate.

Changing views of the play

Most of Stoppard’s early major plays have had a significant revival in London (Jumpers in 1985 and 2003, Rosencrantz in 1987 and 1995, Travesties in 1993, Real Thing in 1999) but in most cases it has taken nearly twenty years for such a high-profile revival to occur. As will be documented in the next chapter, Arcadia was widely produced throughout the world during the 1990s, but it has not yet had a major London revival. In England, Arcadia’s most significant revival came in 2004 at the Bristol Old Vic. Critical response was even more favourable than in 1993. John Peter originally found the play cold and lacking humanity, but now called Arcadia a ‘piece of enchantment’ that is ‘a sad, funny, tough, generous play’, one filled with ‘elegance, intelligence, melancholy and irresistible wit’ (Peter 2004). Likewise, both Georgina Brown and Lyn Gardner acknowledged a mixed to negative view of most of Stoppard’s work, but offered effusive praise for Arcadia: ‘[It] is a thing of such infinite beauty and dazzling complexity. . . It combines the most extraordinary and probing intellectual curiosity with an unguarded heart . . . [This is] a mature

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Stoppard entirely intellectually and emotionally engaged, and the play fizzes with excitement, sex, uncertainty and tragedy as a result’ (Gardner, 2004). Echoing the overwhelmingly positive reviews, both Brown and Dominic Cavendish called it a ‘masterpiece’ (Brown 2004; Cavendish 2004). In the academic realm, most commentary has focused on the science aspects of the play. While the science is generally accurate, Kramer and Kramer have noted Stoppard’s use of dramatic license: The laws of thermodynamics do not deny the absolute nature of time and space, or the deterministic behaviour of particles in motion, or even the possibility of a Laplacian observer . . . [That the heat equations] cannot work equally well whether time is going forward or backward . . . was never considered a point of inerrant scientific scripture by Newton or his followers, and so Septimus’ declaration that Thomasina and her French avatar have ‘discovered heresy’ (81) is a bit hyperbolic. (Kramer & Kramer, 1997: 4) While noting Stoppard’s scientific distortions, the authors ultimately accede that how Stoppard uses science helps him make the larger point, ‘that we cannot in fact go back to or recapture the past’ (Kramer & Kramer, 1997: 5) and that some losses are irrecoverable (Kramer & Kramer, 1997: 7). While a majority of discussions of Arcadia focus on the science aspects and/or the postmodern aspects, some critics have emphasized the personal dynamics of the play. Hersh Zeifman states: ‘This is precisely what Hannah must learn from the past, from the true “genius of the place”: in the midst of a chaotic, disordered world, even in the face of death – especially in the face of death – we must still leave ourselves open to romance, to the vagaries of erotic desire’ (Zeifman, 2001: 190). Likewise, Jim Hunter carefully catalogues how love and sex impact each character (Hunter, 2000: 181–184).

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The most recent academic work to examine Arcadia is Geraldine Cousin’s Playing for Time (2007), a book that locates Stoppard’s play, including its images of catastrophe and loss, as being part of contemporary British theatre’s preoccupation with instability and danger. Overall, it is not that views towards Arcadia have changed; rather the richness and complexity of the play provide ample material for multiple points of emphasis in interpretation.

3 Production History

This chapter provides a brief history of Arcadia on stage, with particular focus on its London premiere in 1993 and its 1995 New York production. A couple of other notable productions, different staging choices, as well as some behind-the-scenes considerations are also discussed.

The original production

The premiere of a new Stoppard play is always an event in the London theatre world, but Arcadia’s appearance on 13 April 1993 carried added significance. With Hapgood (1988) being considered a relative failure, it had been over ten years (The Real Thing in 1982) since Stoppard had had a hit play. While the tabloids focused on the romance between Stoppard and leading lady Felicity Kendal, their first production together since their respective divorces, the more significant behind-the-scenes drama was Stoppard’s opting for a different creative team. Gone was Peter Wood, who had directed all of Stoppard’s major plays from Jumpers through Hapgood, and in his place was Trevor Nunn. Stoppard had worked with Nunn in 1965 when the RSC had hired Stoppard to do script revisions for a production of Slawomir Mrozek’s Tango, and Nunn had directed the 1977 production of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour that was created for presentation with the London Symphony Orchestra to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Nunn was also to have directed the original 1974 RSC production of Travesties. While Stoppard and Nunn had a long history, part of the intrigue stemmed from the fact

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that though Nunn remained Artistic Director Emeritus at the RSC he had directed only one play there during the previous eight years, and now he was stepping over to the Royal National Theatre for the first time. (When Stoppard joined the National Theatre board in 1989, he informally promised them his next play, and so the venue was predetermined.) From the Royal National Theatre’s perspective, the pairing of Nunn and Stoppard carried strong box office appeal. While Nunn was now better known for his direction of megahit musicals such as Cats and Les Miserables, Stoppard felt that people had forgotten Nunn also has a talent for directing straight plays. Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington saw the directorplaywright pairing as a positive collaboration because of Nunn’s ability ‘for uncovering the core of feeling inside complex intellectual structures. [Nunn is a director] who can excavate the emotion underneath the intellectual wordplay’ (Billington, 1993a). Likewise, Nunn expressed his desire to explore the subtext of Arcadia’s characters as he applied his belief that Stoppard ‘writes much more emotionally than he thinks he does’ (Billington, 1993a). Indeed, in the same Arcadia preview article, Billington argues that most productions ‘have played up Stoppard’s high comedy at the price of his existential despair and underlying humanism’, and thus he suggests that directors should ‘reveal the sentiment buried beneath the high-grade repartee’, as they should ‘play up the pain and let the comedy . . . look after itself ’ (Billington, 1993a). In London, the reviews of Arcadia ranged from mixed to exuberant praise. Ira Nadel noted a persistent theme in critical responses to Stoppard, where the play ‘seemed to divide the journals along class lines’ (Nadel, 2002: 445). Likewise, criticisms were centred on perceptions of elitism. While both ‘irritated and exhilarated’ the Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh concluded: ‘Arcadia staggers beneath the weight of its intellectual garb . . . For the scientifically challenged, barriers to understanding loom large’ (De Jongh, 1993).

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De Jongh even dismissed the play’s more humanistic elements – the inability to know the past completely and the search for meaning as life’s grandest pursuit – as ‘simple concepts so pretentiously arrayed’ (De Jongh, 1993). While praising the acting, the Daily Mail ’s Jack Tinker expressed frustration at the play’s intellectual content: ‘Mr Stoppard cannot resist making it too clever by about two-and-three-quarters. One comes away instructed by more than one can usefully wish to know on the theories of advanced “mathematics of deterministic chaos” which apparently have smashed Isaac Newton’s poor fumblings to smithereens’ (Tinker, 1993). Other mixed reviews revisited the often-heard complaint that Stoppard’s writing is too intricate and lacks feeling. While enjoying some charming scenes and good jokes, the Sunday Telegraph’s John Gross was left wondering the following: ‘What exactly they add up to is another matter. The play is full of bright notions and cute analogies but there is a lack of dramatic momentum and inner coherence. And everything seems curiously weightless’ (Gross, 1993). In the Sunday Times, John Peter viewed the play as ‘elegant, complicated, densely argued, serenely inconclusive and cold as ice’ (Peter, 1993). He concluded: ‘The play’s central vacuum [is] its fatal lack of living contact between ideas and people’ (Peter, 1993). Strong champions of Arcadia included the Guardian’s Michael Billington, The Times’s Benedict Nightingale and the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer; all three newspapers also published science guides to the play. Notably, all these reviewers felt the play not only delivered Stoppard’s characteristic mix of intellect and humour, but all three also found the play emotionally moving. Noting that ‘Arcadia is as intricate, elaborate and allusive as anything [Stoppard] has yet written’, Billington also found it ‘unusually moving in its demonstration of the way genuine discoveries outlive the death of their inventors’ (Billington, 1993b). Praising the way ‘Stoppard theatricalises his themes’ Billington cited Thomasina’s lament over the burning of the library at Alexandria as an example of when

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‘Stoppard’s ideas and emotions seamlessly coincide’ (Billington, 1993b). Likewise, Billington noted that ‘beyond the jokes, Stoppard makes something delicately moving out of the way past and present merge as if to cheat the logic of time’, and he concludes that while ‘Stoppard’s previous plays, such as The Real Thing, have had a strong emotional undercurrent, here his ideas and his sympathies work in total harness and give the play a strong pulse of feeling’ (Billington, 1993b). Charles Spencer’s review accented the positioning of Arcadia – after Hapgood ’s failure and over ten years since Stoppard’s last hit play – when he cited it as ‘a terrific return to form’ with gags that ‘have all their old exuberance and elegance’ (Spencer, 1993a). Spencer also praised the play precisely because it ‘makes you think, and think hard’ (Spencer, 1993a). Instead of finding its complexity overwhelming, Spencer noted: ‘It is amazing just how much Stoppard packs into this brilliantly plotted piece – an ingenious literary puzzle about Byron, a dissertation on changing fashions in landscape gardening, as well as a lively debate on Classicism versus Romanticism’ (Spencer, 1993a). While accusations of elitism and snobbery almost always appear in reviews of Stoppard’s plays, Spencer also reflected another recurrent, but divergent, thread: ‘Not the least of Stoppard’s achievements is that he gives even physics O-level failures like myself the flattering illusion that we’re getting to grips with complex scientific ideas’ (Spencer, 1993a). Like Billington and Spencer, in The Times Benedict Nightingale offered a long list of the topics presented in Arcadia, but he added: ‘Don’t be intimidated. Stoppard makes plenty of concessions to those of us who do not carry computers above our necks’ (Nightingale, 1993). Thematically, he recognized ‘Stoppard’s tribute to the complexity, unpredictability and inscrutability of the world’ (Nightingale, 1993). Ultimately, in keeping with Stoppard’s stress on theatre as a form of entertainment, Nightingale praised the quality of the comedy and the narrative, and urged readers to

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instantly get their tickets for a play that is ‘terrific fun’, ‘structurally brilliant’ and ‘comes as close as any to fulfilling [Stoppard’s] creative aim, “the perfect marriage of ideas and high comedy”’ (Nightingale, 1993). While the newspaper reviews were divided, Arcadia resonated with audiences, and it quickly became the highest selling play at the National, selling a remarkable 6,000 copies in its first three weeks. After running for nearly eight months at the National, Arcadia transferred to the West End’s Theatre Royal Haymarket in the spring of 1994 where it ran until June 1995. Some critics felt the re-cast version was even better than the original production, and Charles Spencer raved: ‘I have never left a new play more convinced that I’d just witnessed a masterpiece’ (Spencer, 1994). At the Theatre Royal Haymarket Arcadia had 431 performances, and then enjoyed a six-month tour of Britain. It also won both an Olivier and Evening Standard Award for Best Play. When the RSC revived Travesties in September 1993, Stoppard became the first living playwright to have works staged simultaneously at the Royal National Theatre and at the RSC. Before examining the New York reviews, there are a few production elements not in the text that are illuminating. Both productions featured Trevor Nunn as director, Paul Pyant as lighting designer, Jeremy Sams as sound designer and Mark Thompson as both set and costume designer. In London, Arcadia was performed on a proscenium arch stage, while in New York it was a modified thrust. The downstage apron in New York necessitated some minor variations in blocking, but otherwise the productions were staged and designed indentically, in accordance with Stoppard’s stage directions for a stately country house whose elegance comes from its large architectural scale. While some of Nunn’s blocking choices are discussed in Chapter 2, it is the designer Mark Thompson who also added some thematically rich images. Upon entering the auditorium, the first thing

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the spectator saw was a front curtain that was based on Nicolas Poussin’s Neoclassical painting Spring (1660–1664), an image of Edenic nature, complete with blue sky, lush green rolling hills and Eve offering the apple to Adam. It is a pictorial ‘arcadia’ that also suggests some of the motifs from the play: the conflict between classical and romantic gardening (and ordering of the world), how to describe most accurately the natural world, and the havoc caused by sexual attraction and temptation. As the house lights dimmed, Adam and Eve were bathed in a circle of light that gradually faded as the curtain rose on the stately English country home. While this pre-show image foreshadowed some of the play’s ideas, Thompson also cleverly wove deterministic chaos into his design. As discussed in Chapter 2, fractal geometry involves self-similarity and symmetry across scale. In Thompson’s design the large pattern that appeared on the wood floor was replicated, in smaller scale, on the backs of the chair (see website of original production photos, # 1 and 4). The use of self-similarity in design reinforces Stoppard’s thematic stress on finding the order within the seemingly chaotic.

The New York production

In many of his public appearances, Stoppard talks about how theatre is an event not a text; in other words, it is to be experienced live with an audience and actors rather than read. Another oft-stated principle is his belief that theatre is an empirical art; for every given production there is an equation you are trying to get right. The text, the available pool of actors, the abilities of the production team as well as the constraints placed upon them (budget, resources, available time, etc.), the theatre space, the intended audience and other factors all have to be taken into account. Since Stoppard operates at the highest levels of professional theatre, one sometimes forgets these pragmatic issues, but a look at Arcadia’s transition from London to New York is illuminating.

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While Stoppard retained the London creative team of Nunn and the designers, he and his long-time New York producer Emanuel Azenberg disagreed on the proper venue. Recognizing that you can have a ten-month failure on Broadway or a five-month hit at Lincoln Center (Ickes, 1995), Stoppard wanted the subsidized, not-for-profit theatre. In contrast, Azenberg, as summarized by Ira Nadel, provided four compelling reasons why Arcadia should be done on Broadway: First, Lincoln Center could only do the play with an American cast: their rule is not to use imported actors; second, casting of American actors by a British director was chancy at best and often too quickly done; third, the performance had to be better than it was in England, since the worst notice you could get was that the American production was inferior to the English; and fourth, it was the wrong theatre from the point of size and publicity. (Nadel, 2002: 471–472) While Stoppard chose the Lincoln Center Theatre Company, Azenberg was probably correct. While Stoppard’s choice of Lincoln Center was probably the wrong one, it did allow for another milestone. When Hapgood was unexpectedly extended three times, it overlapped with the premiere of Arcadia, thereby making Stoppard the first living dramatist to have plays running simultaneously on Lincoln Center’s two stages. While Lincoln Center did a remarkable job producing Hapgood, The Invention of Love and The Coast of Utopia (all three directed by Jack O’Brien), Arcadia was their one miss in staging Stoppard. Indeed, the proof of Stoppard’s statement regarding the empirical art of theatre is nowhere more evident than in comparing the response between Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia. Most critics rightly view Arcadia as the superior text, but the effectiveness of O’Brien’s production of The Coast of Utopia helped it earn seven

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Tony Awards to Arcadia’s none. In many ways, the production of The Coast of Utopia surpassed the quality of the play text itself, whereas the New York production of Arcadia was inadequate to capture the richness of that text. Due to different cultural sensibilities and theatrical heritages, for most of his major plays, Stoppard typically cuts about twenty minutes of material when a play transfers from London to New York. In the case of Arcadia, Stoppard remained confident in the quality of the text and its ability to hold the audience’s attention. While Arcadia ultimately won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play of the 1994–1995 season, reviews were decidedly mixed. The New York production lacked the emotion and sensuality that was evident in London, and both the actors and audience seemed out-of-sync with the play’s humour and intelligence. Azenberg hailed the London production as a masterpiece that was the best new play he had seen since a childhood viewing of Death of a Salesman, but found the New York production lacking (Nadel, 2002: 471–473). Indeed, many critics were bothered by inconsistent British accents and the actors’ inability to fully execute Stoppard’s language. The play closed after four and a half months, with the hoped-for Broadway transfer never materializing. A recurrent theme in the New York reviews was the difference between the written text and the viewing experience. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby raved that Arcadia is ‘Stoppard’s richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and, new for him, emotion’, but then tempered his enthusiasm for the production, saying it was ‘a reasonable American facsimile’ of the London production, ‘but it should be better’ (Canby, 1995). Likewise, Variety’s Jeremy Gerard said Stoppard ‘gets everything right’ as textually he ‘hits the bull’s eye’, but unfortunately, it was an ‘uneven and in some aspects disappointing production’ (Gerard, 1995). He ultimately cited the casting as the major problem, finding fault with all four of the leads. In the same vein, The New Yorker’s

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John Lahr cited Arcadia as Stoppard’s ‘best play so far’ but ‘casting glitches’, including American actresses who lacked ‘the erotic amperage’ and ‘sexy twinkle’ of their British counterparts, prevented the production from rising to the brilliance of the text (Lahr, 1995). Time magazine’s Brad Leithauser also found the London acting much better, but he joined other reviewers in praising Robert Sean Leonard, an actor who would later earn a Tony Award for his work in Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. One of the notable divergences from the London reviews is the fact that the production received its rave reviews from the tabloids. New York Newsday, the Daily News, and the New York Post were ecstatic over the play, and all praised the acting as well as the text. The New York Post’s Clive Barnes called it ‘the best Broadway play for many, many a season. It is a work shot through with fun, passion and, yes, genius’ (Barnes, 1995). Other reviews revealed the mind-numbing hold realism weaves over some segments of the U.S. theatre community. Though the Village Voice is the most significant alternative/weekly newspaper in New York, its principal theatre critic Michael Feingold disavowed all of Stoppard’s pre-Arcadia work as being entertainments, but not true plays. His major criticisms of Arcadia’s text rested on presumed breaches of credibility. Namely, he found it unbelievable for Thomasina to be left alone with a rakish young tutor, and concerning Bernard’s Scene Five anti-science diatribe, he wrote: ‘Would a scholar doing research in an elegant country house really deliver a loud, ferocious attack on the eldest son’s profession? Not, I suspect, if he plans to be invited back’ (Feingold, 1995). In the same vein, New York’s John Simon takes Stoppard to task for having ‘an Englishman in 1809 use the Yiddishism tush’ and for having Thomasina and Septimus use Erwin Panofsky’s twentieth-century interpretation of the meaning of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego (Simon, 1995). Whether it be Shakespeare’s invention of Richard III as a hunchback or Desdemona’s melodramatic rise from the dead, the history of

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dramatic writing is populated with moments that defy strict literal interpretation, and Arcadia, from its very conception of alternating, and intermingling, time periods, is a rich example of the magic of theatricality that goes beyond the narrow confines of realism. Other productions

While the New York production failed to live up to expectations, producers recognized the vibrancy and vitality of Arcadia and during the second half of the 1990s it was produced at virtually all of the major regional theatres in the United States, places such as San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, Houston’s Alley Theatre and Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. During the decade following its 1995 New York staging Arcadia also enjoyed hundreds of university productions in the United States. On the international front, within its first two years, Arcadia was staged in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, South Africa, Macedonia, Slovenia, Sweden and Poland. In 1998, it premiered in Prague and in Paris. One of the most intriguing productions occurred in the fall of 1993, when Stoppard’s longtime director Peter Wood staged the play in Zurich. While the London and New York productions used Stoppard’s suggested setting, the playwright describes how Wood and designer Carl Toms completely ignored his stage directions, but created an effective result: The set was very different, but not only in its angles and planes. But what I mean is it was a completely different kind of room and atmosphere. It was shabby and beat up. And the designer had a very good idea; he put a mural of an idealized, sort of [Nicolas] Poussin/Claude [Lorrain] landscape on the big wall facing the audience. It was like a mural on the wall. And so one of the main subject matters of the play was in your face the whole night, which was a terrifically good idea. And the mural was on

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a scrim, so you can light through it. Sometimes this mural disappears and you can see the terrace of the garden outside, and the people would walk into the room, and then the wall would go solid again, and then you’d have this picture of the landscape in front of you again. It was a very brilliant notion. (Fleming, 1993: 22) In the same interview, Stoppard noted how Wood approached the character of Gus slightly differently. It took a while before you realized he didn’t speak. He didn’t say anything, but it didn’t seem important. It’s a while into the play before you think, ‘That boy, he hasn’t said anything yet,’ but there’s nothing spooky about it. He files. A lot of the time he just hangs out. And I liked it. (Fleming, 1993: 23) A related result is that during the London run and in later editions of Arcadia, Stoppard inserted Peter Wood’s idea of having Gus present in Scene Five, with him exiting right after Valentine and Chloë, with Hannah’s line to Bernard amended to: ‘You can leave now, give Lightning [formerly, Gus] a kick on your way out’ (62). In November 1998 Stoppard achieved another rare distinction, as Arcadia became the first play by a living non-Francophone playwright to be produced on the main stage of the Comédie Française. While its historic presentation evoked much fanfare, the play received only a mixed response from its French audience and struggled through its three-month run. Claire Soares, in London’s The Independent, suggests some of the problems of the French production: It translated well, though much of the script’s linguistic witticisms seemed to be overshadowed by the visual slap-stick humour, incorporated by the play’s director, Phillipe Adrien.

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Furthermore, some of the French actors tended to offer a melodramatic interpretation of their characters, which at times were inappropriate to the subtler nuances of the play. (Soares,1998) While the French production was more historic than revelatory, another weak production also, ironically, reinforced the positive image of the play text. In 2000, Peter Wood again directed Arcadia, this time at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Both Nicholas de Jongh and Alastair Macaulay were sharply critical of the acting, but de Jongh liked the play more than he did in his 1993 review, and Macaulay included a historical perspective: ‘More than any other play of the past 10 years, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia keeps growing. It grows when you contemplate it, it grows when you see it again, it even grows in a pale, prissy, and slow new production such as it is now receiving at Chichester’ (Macaulay, 2000). He also noted: ‘Many plays have moved backwards and/or forwards in time, but this is the definitive demonstration of drama that shuttles between two separate eras’ (Macaulay, 2000). Notably, Macaulay faults the production for lacking emotional guts and intensity; in other words, it deviated from the approach Billington had advised directors and actors to take. While Arcadia waits for its first major London revival, it continues to be produced at smaller theatres across the globe. On the other hand, Stoppard’s 1997 plans to turn Arcadia into a film never reached fruition: ‘I thought I saw a movie in it and I don’t usually feel that way with my plays. I kept going until my nose started to bleed from contact with a brick wall’ (Allen-Mills, 1998). Ultimately, the theatricality of a single room serving two time periods did not mesh with the more realistic medium of film. He concluded that the sets would have to be dressed differently for the different eras, and ‘once you’d done that, somehow the magic had gone out of the idea . . . In the end, to make a film based on Arcadia, you have to leave out the play’ (Allen-Mills, 1998).

4 Workshopping the Play

This chapter offers a series of workshop exercises based on Arcadia. They can be used in the classroom or in rehearsal as they are designed for teachers, directors and actors to explore the play’s characters, language and ideas. The use of questions is aimed at promoting discussion and exploration, while references to aspects of Trevor Nunn’s staging should not limit your choices, but rather provide impetus for discovering solutions to the challenges Arcadia poses.

Introduction

Reviewing Arcadia, Damien Jacques warned audiences: ‘Be prepared for an intellectual challenge unlike almost any other you have encountered in a theatre’ (Jacques, 1996). Handling Arcadia’s intellectual demands are one of the many challenges facing actors as they must both understand the play’s ideas and must also clearly communicate them to the audience. At the same time, focusing too much on the play’s intellect runs the risk of losing the human element of the story. Indeed, Arcadia’s success on stage rests on its being a comedic, literary detective story. Thus, the effective delivery of the jokes (i.e. mastery of the language), the clear telling of the narrative, the execution of the emotional dynamics of the characters’ relationships and the explication of the play’s intellectual ideas are all important components that need to be considered as one prepares to stage Arcadia for an audience.

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The Chapter 3 section where Michael Billington and Trevor Nunn advise actors and directors to excavate the emotions underneath the comedy and intellectualism is well-worth exploring and employing. At the same time, Arcadia is a comedy and playing it with excessive naturalism has the potential to suffocate the buoyant humour of the play. Finding the right balance of language, comedy, emotion and intellect is the great challenge facing directors and actors, but the text provides the material for that balance to occur.

Text and context

Stoppard’s plays emerge from his breadth of reading and his fascination with ideas. He often fills his plays with allusions to other works as well as a broad array of artists and intellectuals. Understanding those points of reference are a first step towards comprehending the play’s content and effectively delivering it to an audience. Exercise: As time permits, cast each scene and assign a student dramaturg. Read each scene aloud. Stop the action for each allusion, allowing the dramaturg to comprise a list of references. Likewise, each actor should stop and acknowledge any unfamiliar terms; have the dramaturg record them. For Scene One, the list of allusions might include: ‘QED’ (2), ‘Gallic Wars’ (2), ‘sin of Onan’ (2), ‘Fermat’s last theorem’ (2), ‘Newtonian’ (5), ‘Etonian’ (5), ‘Milton’ (7), ‘Southey’ and his poems ‘“Thalaba”’ and ‘“Madoc”’ (7), ‘Jeffrey and the Edinburgh [Review]’ (7) ‘Lord Holland’ (7) ‘Piccadilly Recreation’ (8), ‘Walter Scott’ (9), ‘Humphry Repton’ (10), ‘Corsican brigands’ (10), ‘Salvator Rosa’ (11), ‘Kew’ (12), ‘Lord Little’ (12), ‘“Et in Arcadia Ego”’ (12), ‘Mrs Radcliffe’ and her novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (13), ‘Horace Walpole’ and his novel The Castle of Otranto (13), and ‘the Baptist in the wilderness’ (14).

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Follow-up: Look up each allusion and discuss their purpose in the scene. Which ones are there for ‘texture’ or a sense of believability? For example, the Piccadilly Recreation is fictitious, and it seems that any Lord could suffice for the reference to Lord Little (12). Which allusions enhance the thematic/intellectual ideas of the play? The Gothic novels of Walpole and Radcliffe as well as the ‘picturesque’ painting style of Rosa also relate to the shift in tastes in landscape gardening and by extension views of beauty, the natural world and the relative balance of order and chaos. Which references are essential to understanding a joke? Onanism (after Genesis 38:9), refers to coitus interruptus as well as male masturbation, and so Septimus’s ‘the seed fell on stony ground’ (2) takes on a very different meaning than its traditional tutor’s sarcasm or its Biblical roots in ‘The Parable of the Sower’ (Matthew 13, Mark 4). For Scene Two, unfamiliar words might include: ‘theodolite’ (15), ‘wrinklies’ (17), ‘commode’ (17), ‘bonhomie’ (19), ‘ha-ha’ (20), ‘DNB’ (21), ‘anchorites’ (26), ‘topped and tailed’ (26), ‘cabalistic’ (27) and ‘topiary’ (27). Follow-up: After looking up their meaning, discuss how each word functions. For example, Chloë’s use of the slang term ‘wrinklies’ helps identify her character and attitude, while the different definitions of ‘commode’ create the confusion between Bernard and Valentine. On the other hand, Hannah and Bernard’s use of ‘topiary’ and ‘DNB’ (Directory of National Biography) gives the play an air of authenticity as they mark out the characters’ comfort levels with the terminology and shorthand of their fields of inquiry. Overall, Stoppard is a writer who proceeds slowly and methodically over each line of dialogue, with each word specifically chosen for its maximum value and impact. For example, he wrote over a dozen different versions of Valentine’s Scene Seven ‘tea going from hot to cold’ speech (75) as he strove for maximum precision. Thus, at a second read-through, going slowly over each scene to fully

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grasp the language and allusions can be a crucial step towards appreciating, and executing, the many-layered meanings of the play and its intellectual and comedic nuances.

Character

Stoppard’s work derives from a desire to discuss certain subjects, and so he populates his plays with articulate characters who can express his ideas. These plays exhibit the author’s love of words, of ideas and of the manipulation of the theatrical medium. Stoppard states: ‘In general terms, I’m not a playwright who is interested in character with a capital K and psychology with a capital S. I’m a playwright interested in ideas and forced to invent characters who express those ideas. All my people speak the same way, with the same cadences and sentence structures. They speak as I do’ (Gussow, 1995: 35). Stoppard has been known to transfer lines among characters, feeling that an individual scene ‘is about what they say, as much as it is about what kind of person is saying it. On the whole, I’m fairly brutal about making these characters say what I want to be said’ (Gussow, 1995: 56). Likewise, Stoppard adds: ‘I don’t write character parts on a conscious level. Because (my characters) are only brought into existence because of my desire to express certain ideas, (actors) have to deduce their characters from what they say’ (O’Connor, 1989: 229). As a result, when actors ask for background about a character, Stoppard says: ‘I’m really baffled by the question, because then I have to invent something which doesn’t contradict what I’ve written’ (O’Connor, 1989: 229). While the lack of character background presents a challenge, it can also be freeing, opening up the avenues for the actor to humanize and individualize the characters. More recently, with plays such as Arcadia and Indian Ink, the characters are more individualized and do not all speak with the

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same voice. At the same time, in discussing Felicity Kendal’s work in Arcadia, Stoppard revealed his main criteria for actors: She was fine when the play opened, but a month later she was absolutely individual and different from the person who had been Hannah when the play opened. She turned into somebody frumpier. I’m fairly easy-going about that side of interpretation, because I have only one concern, and that’s clarity of diction. That’s the only thing that matters to me, working with actors to whom clarity of diction is second nature. (Gussow, 1995: 138) Thus, when playing a Stoppard character, concern for language and proper vocal delivery are paramount. At the same time, it is worth exploring ways to personalize Arcadia’s characters and ways to make each character’s intellectual contribution clear. Group Exercise: Cast the play and then assign each actor a research topic relevant to his or her character. Have each actor present the results of their research to the group. For example, each character’s topic may be as follows: Have the actor playing Septimus share some of the highlights of Lord Byron’s life. Have Hannah summarize the highlights of the Enlightenment; have Bernard do the same for the Romantic period. Have Valentine present an overview of chaos theory; have Thomasina give a presentation on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Have Chloë give a presentation on modern aristocratic dress balls. Have Noakes discuss landscape architecture from the period (including information about Capability Brown). Have Lady Croom discuss the Regency in terms of politics, the aristocarcy and manners (include a consideration of period movement appropriate for men and women). Have Jellaby do an Upstairs/ Downstairs or Gosford Park view of the life of a servant circa early 1800s. Have Brice discuss military customs and sexual mores of the period. Have Chater talk about poetry of the period. Have Gus/

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Augustus discuss the differences in upbringing for aristocratic children during their respective periods. Follow-up: After each presentation have a short group discussion. What was learned? Where or how might the information be applicable or pertinent for enacting Arcadia? The presentations will be most beneficial if students can present the factual material they have researched and also restate that information in their own words. In other words, the project should help each actor come to know and understand their intellectual part of the play on a more personal or intuitive level. Ultimately, the exercise should help the cast take hold of the play’s ideas and give them a better understanding of the story and the intellectual/cultural context that informs it. While the above exercise looks at the play holistically and intellectually, the next exercise and the ensuing section seek to explore the more personal and emotional side of the play. Group Exercise: Have each actor go through the play and identify the one line of dialogue that best sums up his or her dominant characteristic. Explain the reason for picking that line and what you feel it reveals about your character’s make-up. For example, for Hannah it might be ‘It’s wanting to know that makes us matter’ (75); the line embodies her quest for knowledge and the inherent humanity and meaning that derives from the pursuit. For Bernard, it might be: ‘No, no, look at me, not at the book’ (30); it reflects his ego and how the focus is always on what will further/ satisfy his own desires.

Love and sex

Virtually every character is directly, or potentially, involved in a love relationship, and each character’s past history with love and sex will inform how he or she approaches that potential relationship. Likewise, the romantic history of the would-be lover will also

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influence the dynamic of the scene. Since the most successful productions of Arcadia have conveyed the play’s pathos and the characters’ emotions, an exploration of different ways of playing scenes can be useful. Exploring Hannah: While Bernard and Chloë are the modern couple that gets together sexually, it is Hannah who is the object of desire for Valentine, Bernard and Gus. She is also an enigma, with her emotional reserve unexplained. In earlier, unpublished drafts, Stoppard provided more of a backstory. In one draft Hannah was previously married to a publisher: ‘The publisher said my only chance was to marry someone like him, so I did. We parted over residual rights. Publishing and sex’ (Stoppard, 1992: 92). Likewise, until a couple of weeks before previews, the Scene Seven text that was rehearsed had (after Valentine’s proposal) a section where Hannah reiterated that she had received many proposals, with the first time being by a pig farmer who called her piglet (Stoppard, 1993a). Ultimately, Stoppard felt his intended pig farmer jokes were not working, and so he cut the section. In each case his attempt at a backstory for Hannah was rooted in potential jokes. Ultimately, he left her past more open-ended, with other characters offering their theories. But what choices do you make as an actress in explaining Hannah’s emotional make-up? Why are sex and romance less important to her now (33), and why did she turn down multiple marriage proposals (63)? What effect do different backstories have on how Hannah is played and perceived? Exercise and discussion: Chloë believes Hannah ‘was deeply wounded’ (57), Bernard thinks she is sexually repressed (63) and Valentine posits that her ‘classical reserve is only a mannerism; and neurotic’ (75). Try each of those three backstories for three different short scenes: 1) Scene Two, from Hannah’s ‘How did you know I was here?’ to Hannah’s ‘I’m not sure I like it’ (23). (Though this is not a

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romantic scene per se for Hannah, Bernard is described as having a lot of sexual energy and he clearly wants something from Hannah.) 2) Scene Five, from Bernard’s ‘Well, it’s all trivial, isn’t it?’ to Hannah’s ‘Thank you’ (63–64). 3) Scene Seven, from Hannah’s ‘You can’t believe in an afterlife,’ to Valentine’s ‘No, stay’ (75). What effect does each backstory have on how the scene is played? Which backstory (or combination) feels most right for Hannah? What accounts for the difference in her response to Bernard’s Scene Five proposal and Valentine’s Scene Seven proposal? As the last question suggests, the dynamic of any scene rests on the interplay between the respective characters, and changing the backstory of the other character may well affect how your character responds. Exploring Valentine: The emotional and intellectual dance between Hannah and Valentine is informed by his unrequited love for Hannah. How does Valentine’s romantic history affect the playing of the references to Valentine being Hannah’s fiancée? How does Valentine’s position as a member of the aristocracy affect him? Does he come across as arrogant or privileged? Does he appear to be sheltered? What is his past relationship with women? Is he sexually confident or more inhibited? Has he ‘loved and lost’ or ‘never truly loved before’? How real or affecting is any personal pain he feels from Hannah’s rejection? In what aspects of his life is Valentine most confident? Exercise: Construct different romantic biographies for Valentine and then play the Scene Seven proposal between him and Hannah (75). How do the different biographies affect the dynamics? What is the difference between having Valentine play it as a casual proposition versus there being a subtext of pain and true disappointment?

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Improvisation and group discussion: Improvise a scene in which Valentine makes a sincere proposal to Hannah. How does he arrange the setting? What strategies does he use to try winning her? Have the other actors observe the scene, and then assess how the actor playing Valentine answered the above questions regarding Valentine’s romantic past, self-confidence and the affect of his aristocratic upbringing. What moments and choices revealed the most about the character’s background and the decisions the actor made? Bringing it together: From the above exercises and discussion, choose what you feel are appropriate emotional backstories for Valentine and Hannah, and now perform part of their Scene Four discussion regarding deterministic chaos. (Any section from Hannah’s ‘Why were these things saved, do you think?’ (44) to Hannah’s ‘I’ve always been given credit for my unconcern’ (49).) How does their respective emotional lives affect this intellectual discussion? What do these characters have in common? What brings them together and what drives them apart? What blocking choices reveal the relative connection and distance between the characters? Original Production: While deterministic chaos is part of the play’s intellectual content, Trevor Nunn’s staging also made this Scene Four conversation an intimate scene. During Valentine’s ‘If you knew the algorithm’ (47) speech, Valentine and Hannah were kneeling, facing each other (see website of original production photos, #4). At the end of the speech, Valentine tried to kiss her, but was rebuffed. Nonetheless, during the stage direction ‘the piano is heard again’ (48), Hannah let Valentine rest his head in her lap. Nunn’s blocking provided motivation for Valentine’s ensuing ‘She won’t let anyone kiss her’ (49), while also showing that Hannah had an emotional tenderness, but not a sexual attraction, for Valentine.

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Exploring the past

One of the great challenges facing student actors is the playing of period scenes; at the same time Arcadia is a twentieth-century approximation of the early 1800s, in which Stoppard seeks the general look and feel of the era but not strict verisimilitude. The dialogue is written in a stylized manner, and for an actual production, work with a voice and text coach is crucial for achieving the proper tone and rhythmic delivery. Likewise, for an actual production it is vital that the director or a movement coach work with the actors on achieving the appropriate sense of posture, movement and social etiquette. In other words, there are a whole set of performance conventions that must be mastered to make the past scenes as rich and vibrant as they can be. While there are issues of period style that must be addressed, providing a full-bodied presentation of Thomasina and Septimus are also vital to realizing the emotional and intellectual content of the play. Discussion: What aspects of Septimus and Thomasina mark them as early-nineteenth-century characters? What about them feels contemporary? What lines, via syntax or phrasing, evoke the nineteenth century? What lines sound modern? Exercise: Have the actors playing Septimus and Thomasina read their lines for a section of Scene Three, going from Septimus’s, ‘Try to put some poetry into it’ (36) and ending by his, ‘At Harrow I was better at this than Lord Byron’ (39). They should be looking at the core circumstances and general flow of the scene. When they have scanned their lines a couple of times, have the actors improvise the scene. They can use lines from the text if they feel the need to speak them, but otherwise they should use their own approximation of the line and its meaning. When the scene is finished, look again at the text, and re-read it carefully to see what was missed. What sections were remembered and what sections were missed? Evaluate why certain circumstances/sections were missed.

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Why are the actors comfortable with certain sections but not others? After evaluation, repeat the exercise and evaluation. On the third time through the scene, try to use more of the play text; this move to more of a mix between improvisation and the actual lines should help the actor invest the dialogue with a more personal understanding of the dynamics of the scene. This exercise, based on Richard Brestoff’s Acting Under the Circumstances (with this particular exercise rooted in Appendix A of Stanislavski’s Creating a Role), is designed to help actors take ownership of the lines their characters say. The idea is to find the investment in each moment akin to the amount of time a playwright spends in coming up with the specific dialogue. There is a great deal that goes into each line, and this exercise is designed to begin to explore those depths. Missed ideas usually indicate that the specific circumstances have not yet been ingrained in the actor. For this particular scene, the long speeches will be especially difficult for actors to remember, but their initial paraphrasing should help identify the main ideas of the speeches as well as their intuitive/impulsive connection to the material and what is important to their character. This exercise can be applied to any section of the play and is good for the early phases of rehearsal as it fosters a simultaneous conjunction of line memorization and character creation. Exploring Thomasina: Within Arcadia, the character that changes the most is Thomasina. How is Thomasina different between Scenes One and Three (where she is thirteen)and Scene Seven (when she is almost seventeen)? In what moments are those changes most evident? In both sections she is curious, clever, slightly mischievous and confident. Her innocence and intelligence are part of her charm. Probably the most notable change is her evolving sense of sexuality. Exercise: Cast two sets of actors and perform three short scenes: 1) The opening scene to Septimus’s, ‘It is much nicer than that’ (4). [The same scene will be explored below for its comic

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content; here the focus is on discovering the arc of Thomasina’s character.] 2) Scene Seven, from Thomasina’s ‘I told him you kissed me’ (80) to her line that ends ‘started in Germany!’ (80). Or until her, ‘Show me where to read’ (81). 3) Scene Seven, from Septimus’s ‘My lady! What is it?’ (91) to Thomasina’s ‘Silence!’ (92). It can be extended to include Septimus’s ‘Take your essay’ (96) to Thomasina’s ‘Once more, for my birthday’ (96). After the groups have performed, analyse the choices that the actors made. Are the attempts at playing aged thirteen rooted in stereotypes or in believable choices? How do the energy levels and physicality change for the different ages? Was the arc from sexual naiveté through to teenage flirtatiousness, culminating in her daring proposition believable? At the same time, what aspects of her personality and demeanour remain ever-present through time? How can those constant traits be used to help make the character believable at both ages?

Comedy

While it may be stating the obvious, one of the keys to comedy is knowing where the jokes are. The character may not know it is a joke – and indeed, the joke may rest on the character’s ignorance – but the actor should know where the jokes are. While an actor can never count on getting a laugh, certain lines nonetheless need to be delivered for their comedic quality. Exercise: Cast two sets of actors to play Thomasina and Septimus. Have each pair perform the opening of the play to Septimus’s ‘Oh no, it is much nicer than that’ (4). What choices did each actor make? Which were most effective and why? On what lines is Thomasina truly innocent and what lines might suggest her being sly or clever? Where are the jokes in

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this scene and how are they achieved? If a seeming joke did not evoke a laugh, analyse why the joke failed to connect. Was it a matter of not understanding the reference? Was it a question of language or not delivering the line with the right rhythm or right emphasis? Was it a matter of how the character’s attitude or selfawareness was played? Understanding the answers to these types of questions should help with gaining a sense of confidence in how to play the period style for its comedic effect. Apply the same exercise to the Scene One meeting between Septimus and Chater (Septimus’s ‘Now, sir, what is this business that cannot wait?’ (6) to his ‘For that alone, I would not make her a widow’ (8)). Note the different types of comedy employed. Septimus’s humour is often grounded in his superior intellect and self-confidence as he twists Chater’s words (‘insulted my wife’ (6); ‘I demand satisfaction!’ (6)) to use their alternate meanings to gain the upper hand and keep Chater off-guard. On the other hand, Chater’s humour is grounded in his bumbling character and his desire to be more than he is. His triumphant exoneration of his wife’s infidelity is his means of saving face. Have the actors experiment with accenting the jokes and with playing them more subtly. Within that scene which words should receive emphasis and which jokes work better when underplayed? Typically, a variety of tonalities will achieve maximum effect as the comedy flows between language, character and the dynamic of the situation; a scene that begins as a challenge to a duel ends with an extremely ironic dedication: the audience notes what Chater does not – ‘Septimus Hodge, who stood up and gave his best on behalf of the Author’ (9) also alludes to Septimus’s ‘perpendicular poke’ (7) of Mrs Chater. Cross-talk exercise: One of Stoppard’s favourite devices is cross-talk, moments where two or more characters think they are talking about the same topic, but are actually referring to different things. Look at the scene that begins with Lady Croom’s, ‘Oh, no!

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Not the gazebo!’ (9). How does cross-talk work in this scene? What does each character think is the subject of the conversation? Lady Croom, Brice and Noakes continually refer to the proposed changes in the family garden while Septimus and Chater believe they are talking about sexual matters. For example, Septimus’s, ‘Mr Noakes, this is monstrous!’ (10) stems from his belief that Noakes has spied on him having sex with Mrs Chater on more than one occasion, while Lady Croom’s reply expresses her pleasant surprise at Septimus’s seeming support of her objections to Noakes’s designs. Likewise, Noakes’s, ‘it is the modern style’ (10) refers to the changing aesthetics reflected in his designs, while Chater’s follow-up, ‘Regrettable, of course, but so it is’ (10) refers to a perceived decline in sexual morals. It takes Thomasina’s reference to ‘carnal embrace’ (10) to clear up the cross-talk, while simultaneously launching the next round of misunderstanding. The ensuing comedy includes examples of Thomasina’s more clever side, where she outwits her elders, as well as some of Lady Croom’s finest epigrammatic wit. Once everyone is clear on their respective understanding of what is being said, play the scene to discover how to maximize the comedy, both verbally and non-verbally, of the cross-talk.

Telling the story

Since a good detective story relies on subtle clues, the director and actors must look for non-verbal opportunities to convey where the characters are at in solving the mystery. For example, one of Hannah’s major quests is to discover the hermit of Sidley Park. For each scene, chart where she is in discovering, and then proving, his identity? On the textual level, her first articulation that Septimus may be the hermit occurs at the end of Scene Five, but may the thought have occurred to her before she speaks it?

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Exercise: Look at the stage directions that close Scene Four. Go beyond what is described there and make a choice that suggests Hannah has made a discovery, something that may lead her to where she wants to go. To do this, you must look at what other items are onstage at the time and how the preceding conversation provides context for her non-verbal reactions. Original production: The preceding conversation notes that Thomasina’s maths primer had been owned by Septimus Hodge and that whoever did the iteration would ‘have to be insane’ (52). That final word is what Hannah ruminates over as, she ‘stays, thoughtful’ (52). In Trevor Nunn’s production, after Hannah ‘picks up the Cornhill Magazine’ (52), she crossed to the reading stand, and turned the sketchbook to the page that has the drawing of the hermit. As she looked at the drawing, her face registered a look of recognition, a sense that she had an idea, and thus she exited the room with an air of confidence. Thus, the last visual motif for Act One was an affirmation of the human pursuit for knowledge, an optimistic image that people can navigate through the chaos to reach at least a provisional sense of order. Now look again at the text that ends Scene Five when Hannah first voices her theory that Septimus is the hermit (66); throughout rehearsals Stoppard continually noted that he needed to fix the ending of the scene. In an earlier draft it read: VALENTINE: What is? HANNAH: The hermit was born in the same year as Septimus Hodge. VALENTINE: Did Bernard bite you in the leg? HANNAH: It’s not funny. My hermit was a perfect symbol. An idiot in the landscape. What am I going to do now? (Stoppard, 1992: 65)

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Look at the text that Stoppard added. What lines stand out? What effect do they have? Hannah’s first line above is neater and cleaner, and so Stoppard’s addition to that passage is aimed at showing Hannah’s mind at work; how she logically pieces together the puzzle. More notable are the lines that replace the uncertainty of ‘What am I going to do now?’ Instead, Stoppard makes her confident (‘This is better’, ‘I do [know that]’ (66)) and assertive (‘Somewhere there will be something . . . if only I can find it’ (66)) as her intuitive side is revealed. Combine a verbal emphasis on select ideas of the added text with the non-verbal discovery/intuition that ends Scene Four, and there is a clearer arc to Hannah’s discovery and a fuller dramatization of Stoppard’s embrace of the dual-processing of logic and intuition; of the rational and irrational. In other words, these subtle choices help tell the detective story while also furthering the humanistic themes of the both/and nature of the world.

Textual echoes

As discussed in Chapter 2, the use of self-similarity relates to fractal geometry and signifies that there is regularity or something preserved beneath a changing, turbulent surface. In crafting Arcadia, Stoppard inserts numerous ‘textual echoes’ – words, phrases or situations – that recur across the time periods. Examine the play, and compile a list of ‘textual echoes’. A partial list might include: Septimus’s use of the Latin ‘caro’ (1, 2) which is also the name of Hannah’s best-selling book Caro (20); Noakes’s ‘Mr Walpole the gardener?!’ (13) and Bernard’s ‘Noakes . . . the painter?’ (25); Bernard’s ‘“Lord Byron remarked wittily at breakfast!”’ (32) and Thomasina’s ‘Lord Byron was amusing at breakfast’ (36); Bernard’s suggestion that Byron sent Septimus a letter requesting that he ‘Burn this’(57) and the Scene Six moment when Septimus burns the unopened letter from Byron (71);

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Lady Croom’s ‘I do not know when I have received a more unusual compliment’ (72) and Hannah’s ‘I don’t know when I’ve received a more unusual proposal’ (75); and, of course, Thomasina’s ‘Am I the first person to have thought of this?’ (5) and Chloë’s ‘Do you think I’m the first person to think of this?’ (73). While the significance of the ‘textual echoes’ varies from being clever to being integral to enjoying the literary detective story to enhancing the themes, each of them is part of Stoppard’s very careful design for the play. In some instances, the director and actors may wish to use similar blocking choices to reinforce the ways moments echo through time, while for other ones Stoppard’s request for ‘clarity of diction’ may be all the highlighting they need.

Musical idiosyncracies

One of Stoppard’s idiosyncracies is that he ‘tend[s] to write each play to one record’ (Schiff, 1989: 213). During the months of composition he plays a particular song repeatedly as he takes a break from writing to read through the dialogue he has written. For Arcadia, it was the Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ (Fleming, 1993: 24). He wanted it to be the closing song, but was informed that you can not waltz to it. While it does not fit musically with the style and tone of Arcadia, discuss the ways in which the song might be thematically or subconsciously appropriate?

Conclusion

Having read the play and explored it through exercises and/or rehearsals, discuss what real-life associations the play has for contemporary audiences. Likewise, what aspects of the play are relevant to your own life? How have your views of the play changed? What might constitute a contemporary ‘arcadia’?

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Overall, Arcadia is a rich, challenging play, but it should also be fun. Rather than be intimidated by the play, actors should trust the text to lead them to where they need to go. The above exercises can be abbreviated, extended or transferred among characters. Likewise, the preceding chapters have hopefully helped illuminate and clarify some of Arcadia’s complexities. It is the epitome of a ‘comedy of ideas’ that should also move us emotionally. With its abundant humour, clever narrative and dual probing of both scientific and human implications of late-twentieth-century thought, Arcadia is an artistic work that should entertain and stimulate readers and audiences for many years to come.

Timeline

Science

Arts

1637 Pierre de Fermat articulates his Last Theorem with a claim that he has a proof, but does not record it

1618–1622 Guercino paints Et in Arcadia Ego

1651 Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan, a work of political science concerning the foundations of society and types of government. He also championed geometry and a mechanistic view of the world

1630 Nicolas Pousin paints first version of Et in Arcadia Ego; 2nd version painted in 1638 c. 1636 onwards Claude Lorraine becomes known for his pastoral, ‘arcadian’ landscape paintings

1684 Gottfried Leibniz publishes an account of his version of calculus; Newton first publishes on calculus in 1693

c. 1637 Salvator Rosa begins painting his rugged, ‘romantic’ landscapes that help define the ‘picturesque’ aesthetic

1687 Isaac Newton publishes Principia Mathematica in which he describes universal gravitation and the three laws of motion; it lays the basis for classical mechanics

1658–1664 John Milton writes Paradise Lost

1712 Newcomen Steam Engine is invented by Thomas Newcomen 1797 Sir Joseph Banks, a botanist, officially becomes King George III’s adviser on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

1764 Horace Walpole publishes the gothic novel The Castle of Otranto; Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown redesigns the landscaping at Blenheim Palace 1783 ‘Capability’ Brown dies 1788 Humphry Repton begins his career as a landscape gardener

Timeline

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Science

Arts

1811 Jean-Baptiste Fourier’s essay ‘On the Propagation of Heat in Solid Bodies’ wins a prize from the Paris Institute

and begins the practice of using ‘Red Books’ to show his clients what their gardens will look like before and after his designs; Lord Byron born

1814 Pierre-Simon Laplace articulates his view of ‘causal determinism’

1794 Mrs Radcliffe publishes the gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho

1824 Sadi Carnot publishes Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. This theoretical treatise on heat engines helps lay the foundation for the Second Law of Thermodynamics

1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge publish Lyrical Ballads; it begins the Romantic era in English literature

1850 Rudolf Clausius formulates the Second Law of Thermodynamics

1801 Robert Southey publishes his narrative poem Thalaba the Destroyer

1865 Clausius introduces the concept of entropy

1803 Henry Fuseli made Keeper of the Royal Academy of Art

1905 Albert Einstein publishes his ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ which reconciles mechanics with electromagnetism

1805 Southey publishes his epic poem Madoc

1915–1916 Einstein publishes his ‘General Theory of Relativity’ which unifies special relativity with Newton’s laws of gravity

1808 Sir Walter Scott publishes his epic poem Marmion 1809 Byron publishes English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; from July 1809 through July 1811 Byron travels abroad

1922 Niels Bohr wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum mechanics

1810–1820 Coleridge lectures on Romanticism and on Shakespeare

1927 Werner Heisenberg discovers the ‘uncertainty principle’ of quantum mechanics

1812 The publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage makes Byron famous;

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Timeline

Science

Arts

1932 Werner Heisenberg wins the Nobel Prize in Physics

Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb have a very public affair

1971 Mathematicians David Ruelle and Floris Takens publish ‘On the Nature of Turbulence’ in which they coin the term ‘strange attractor’

1815 Byron publishes the poem ‘She Walks in Beauty’

1974–1976 Using iterated algorithms Robert May publishes his initial research on the way biological populations bifurcate 1975 Mathematician James Yorke publishes a paper entitled ‘Period Three Implies Chaos’; it leads to the term ‘chaos theory’ 1977 Benoit Mandelbrot publishes The Fractal Geometry of Nature 1978–1981 Mitchell Feigenbaum publishes his major works on ‘universal behavior in nonlinear systems’ 1988 Stephen Hawking publishes A Brief History of Time 1993 Two months after Arcadia opens Andrew Wiles solves Fermat’s Last Theorem

1816 Byron leaves England forever; Byron writes his poem ‘Darkness’; Thomas Love Peacock publishes Headlong Hall; the character Marmaduke Milestone is based on Humphry Repton 1824 Byron dies 1834 Coleridge dies 1860–1863 William Thackeray serves as the editor of the Cornhill Magazine 1920 D H Lawrence publishes his novel Women in Love 1944–1951 Byron biographer Peter Quennell serves as editor of the Cornhill Magazine 1945 Evelyn Waugh publishes his novel Brideshead Revisited

Further Reading

The play

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, London: Faber, 1993. Whereas a number of Stoppard’s plays exist in significantly different editions; the individual Faber text (1993); U.S. Doubleday edition (1994); the Samuel French acting edition (1995), and Faber collected edition [in Tom Stoppard Plays 5, 2000] are all essentially the same text. The minor emendation (found in later printings of the 1993 text onwards) of adding Gus to Scene Five is noted in Chapter 3. The playwright

Delaney, P (ed.) (1994), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Putting each interview in context, Delaney provides an excellent collection of 39 Stoppard interviews, ranging from 1967 through to 1993. Cumulatively, it offers a clear articulation of Stoppard’s personal views and his relative intent on each play discussed. Fleming, J (2001), Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order Amid Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press. Uses unpublished correspondence and drafts from the Tom Stoppard archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center as it provides in-depth analysis for each of Stoppard’s major plays from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead to The Invention of Love. It examines each play for its point of origin, explication of central ideas, textual variations, and how

108

Further Reading

Stoppard’s chosen themes are manifested in text and production. Also discusses unpublished Stoppard works such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, The Gamblers and the previously lost Galileo. Gussow, M (1995), Conversations with Stoppard, London: Nick Hern Books. Though less inclusive than Delaney’s collection, it provides seven informative Stoppard interviews (1972–1995) conducted by New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow. Hunter, J (2000), A Faber Critical Guide: Tom Stoppard, London: Faber. Aimed at a student reader, it specifically looks at Rosencrantz, Jumpers, Travesties and Arcadia. For each play it provides a synopsis and analysis of themes, characters and stagecraft, as well as a series of textual notes aimed at clarifying terms and allusions. Kelly, K (ed.) (2001), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aimed at an academic audience, it brings together over a dozen U.S. and British scholars for an insightful collection of essays that cover not only Stoppard’s plays but also his fiction and screenwriting. Nadel, I (2002), Tom Stoppard: A Life, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nadel offers the first Stoppard biography. At over 500 pages, the book sometimes gets bogged down in details, but the cooperation of Stoppard’s family, friends, professional colleagues and ultimately Stoppard himself, results in the revelation of some previously unrevealed aspects of the playwright’s personal life.

The cultural context

Blyth, H (1972), Caro: The Fatal Passion, New York: Coward, McCann & Geohagen. Though somewhat melodramatic, Caro offers an informative biography of Lady Caroline Lamb, with particular emphasis placed on the effects of her romantic relationship with Lord Byron.

Further Reading 109

Briggs, J & Peat, F D (1989), Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, New York: Harper & Row. Designed for the lay reader, the book offers an accessible account of chaos theory, including discussions of strange attractors, fractals and time’s arrow. Their chosen metaphor of the ‘turbulent mirror’ (that is reflecting the natural world) results in a division of the book into aspects of the new science that show the ways order falls apart into chaos as well as how chaos makes order. In the process, they relate principles of chaos theory to examples from everyday life. Gleick, J (1987), Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Penguin Books. By focusing on personalities, such as Mitchell Feigenbaum and Benoit Mandelbrot, who made the discoveries that lead to ‘chaos theory’, Gleick crafted an engaging bestseller. Each chapter looks at a specific aspect of the theory, such as ‘the Butterfly Effect’, and the individual scientist or mathematician most associated with its discovery. This entertaining and accessible account of the new math/science provided one of the intellectual seeds for Arcadia. Hunt, J D & Willis, P (eds) (1988), The Genius of the Place, The English Landscape Garden 1620–1820, Boston: MIT Press. The silent lifting of this book’s title for Hannah’s proposed book suggests Stoppard’s debt to this collection of essays covering the evolution of two centuries of English gardening trends. Includes over 100 illustrations. Marchand, L (1957), Byron: A Biography, New York: Knopf. This three-volume edition was both updated and condensed into Byron: A Portrait, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. While Marchand’s scholarship has recently been challenged by Jeffrey Hoeper (2002), his work remains the dominant and definitive Byron biography. Like virtually all Byron biographers, Marchand engages in a fair amount of speculation that is often presented as uncontested fact.

110

Further Reading

Shepherd-Barr, K (2006), Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen, Princeton: Princeton University Press. An informative account of theatre that engages with science. Particular attention is paid to twentieth-century works, with an emphasis on the 1990s as a particularly fertile decade for science-based plays. Websites

Devaney, R ‘Chaos, Fractals, and Arcadia’, http://math.bu.edu/ DYSYS/arcadia Written by a mathematics professor, this site not only provides a discussion of the relevant mathematical aspects of Arcadia, but it also provides some fractal images, showing how iterations can lead to objects similar to Thomasina’s leaf. Moss, S ‘Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’, http://www.cherwell.oxon.sch. uk/arcadia Written as a guide for Students of the English A-level, the site provides a brief overview of aspects of Arcadia as well as sample exam questions from the late 1990s. Opitz, L ‘Arcadia Study Guide’, http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/ theater/productions/arcadia Probably the best of the non-commercial online study guides, it offers nicely detailed summaries of figures and ideas relevant to Arcadia. Considering the importance of language, the ‘Glossary of Definitions, Terms, Names, Contexts, and Allusions’ is particularly useful as a quick guide. Photo Stage, http://www.photostage.co.uk Under ‘Galleries’, in the ‘Drama’ section there is a link to photos of Stoppard’s plays, including 19 archival photos of the original cast production of Arcadia at the Royal National Theatre. Zito, G ‘IFD: Internet Fractal Database’, http://www.ba.infn.it/~zito/ project/gallerie.html Via its links to over 90 internet sites, this is one of many websites where one can view hundreds of fractal images.

References

Allen-Mills, T (1998), ‘Translating Monsieur Stoppard’, Sunday Times, 29 November. Barnes, C (1995), ‘Glory of Arcadia’, New York Post, 31 March. Billington, M (1987), Stoppard: The Playwright. London: Methuen. —, (1993a), ‘Joker above the abyss’, Guardian, 2 April. —, (1993b), ‘Hand on heart and tongue in cheek’, Guardian, 14 April. Brown, G (2004), ‘Delivering the shocks’, Mail on Sunday, 26 September. Canby, V (1995), ‘Stoppard comedy bridges centuries and states of mind’, New York Times, 31 March. Cavendish, D (2004), [Review of Arcadia], Daily Telegraph, 2 October. Reprinted in Theatre Record, Vol. 24, No. 19, 1216–1217. Cousin, G (2007), Playing for Time: Stories of Lost Children, Ghosts and the Endangered Present in Contemporary Theatre. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. De Jongh, N (1993), ‘Complicating the meaning of life in Stoppard’s Arcadia’, Evening Standard, 14 April. —, (2000), ‘Life’s sums don’t add up’, Evening Standard, 23 August. Demastes, W & Kelly, K E (1994a), ‘The playwright and the professors: An interview with Tom Stoppard,’ South Central Review, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1–14. Demastes, W (1994b), ‘Re-inspecting the crack in the chimney: Chaos theory from Ibsen to Stoppard’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 39, 242–254.

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References

Edwardes, J (1995), [Review of Indian Ink] Time Out, 8 March. Reprinted in Theatre Record, Vol. 15, No. 5, 253. Feingold, M (1995), ‘Entropical fevers’, Village Voice, 11 April. Fleming, J (1993), ‘A talk with Tom Stoppard’, Theatre Insight, Vol. 10, 19–27. Gardner, L (2004), ‘Review: Theatre’, Guardian, 27 September. Gerard, J (1995), ‘Arcadia’, Variety, 31 March. Gitlin, T (1989), ‘Postmodernism: Roots and politics’, in Angus, I & Jhally, S, Cultural Politics in America, New York: Routledge, 347–360. Gleick, J (1987), Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin. Grimes, W (2006), ‘Mapping Stoppard’s circuitous “Coast”’, New York Times, 24 November. Gross, J (1993), [Review of Arcadia] Sunday Telegraph, 18 April. Reprinted in Theatre Record, Vol. 13, No. 8, 409. Guppy, S (1988), ‘Tom Stoppard: The art of Theater VII’, The Paris Review, Vol. 109 (Winter). Reprinted in Delaney, P. Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 177–192. Gussow, M (1995), Conversations with Stoppard. London: Nick Hern Books. Hawkes, N (1993), ‘Plotting the course of a playwright’, Times (London), 13 April. Hayman, R (1982), Tom Stoppard (4th edn). London: Heinemann. Hickling, A (1993), ‘A clever play on words’, Yorkshire Post, 26 November. Highfield, R (1993), ‘Stoppard solves the problem’, Daily Telegraph, 15 April. Hill, T (1997), ‘The arts’, Sunday Telegraph, 28 September. Hobson, H (1967), ‘A fearful summons’, Sunday Times, 16 April. Hudson, R, Itzin, C & Trussler, S (1974), ‘Ambushes for the audience: Towards a high comedy of ideas’, Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 14. Reprinted in Delaney, P. Tom Stoppard in

References 113

Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 51–72. Hunter, J (2000), A Faber Critical Guide: Tom Stoppard. London: Faber and Faber. Ickes, B (1995), ‘Surely you’re joking, Mr. Stoppard!’, New York, 9 January. Jackson, K (1993), ‘A little place in the country’, The Independent, 22 April. Jacques, D (1996), ‘Stoppard’s “Arcadia” makes audience think’, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 15 September. Kramer, P & Kramer, J (1997), ‘Stoppard’s Arcadia: Research, time, loss’, Modern Drama, Vol. 40, No.1, 1–10. Kupferman, J (2003), ‘Science in theater’, PhysicaPlus: Online Magazine of the Israel Physical Society, 1–25. Lahr, J (1995), ‘Blowing hot and cold’, The New Yorker, 22 April. Leithauser, B (1995), ‘A house of games’, Time, 10 April. Macaulay, A (2000), ‘Actors fail to seize Stoppard’s moment’, Financial Times, 25 August. Nadel, I (2002), Tom Stoppard: A Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nathan, D (1993), ‘In a country garden (If it is a garden)’, Sunday Telegraph, 28 March. Nightingale, B (1993), ‘Ideas meet their comic match’, The Times, 14 April. O’Connor, T (1989), ‘Welcome to the world of Tom Stoppard’, Orange County Register, 2 April 1989. Reprinted in Paul Delaney, Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 225–230. Peter, J (1993), ‘What time is it?’, Sunday Times, 18 April. —, (2004), [Review of Arcadia], Sunday Times, 26 September. Reprinted in Theatre Record, Vol. 24, No. 19, 1216.

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References

Porusch, D (1990), ‘Making chaos: Two views of a new science’, New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4, 427–442. Schiff, S (1989), ‘Full Stoppard’, Vanity Fair, Vol. 52, No. 5. Reprinted in Paul Delaney, Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 212–224. Shepherd-Barr, K (2006), Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shulman, M (1978), ‘The politicizing of Tom Stoppard’, New York Times, 23 April. Simon, J (1995), ‘Wits’ end’, New York, 10 April. Soares, C (1998), ‘First night: French warm to dramatics of Tom Stoppard’, The Independent, 27 November. Spencer, C (1993a), [Review of Arcadia] Daily Telegraph, 14 April. Reprinted in Theatre Record, Vol. 13, No. 8, 410–411. — , (1993b), ‘Stoppard, master of the play on words’, Daily Telegraph, 8 September. —, (1994), ‘Stoppard’s thrilling workout’, Daily Telegraph, 26 May. Stokes, J (2002), ‘Guilt edged’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 November. Stoppard, T (1972), Jumpers. New York: Grove Press. —, (1977) ‘But for the middle classes’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 June. —, (1988) ‘Hapgood Crib.’ Ts. [n.d.] University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Box 13.6. —, (1992) Arcadia. Manuscript draft dated November 1992. University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Box 41.1. —, (1993a) Arcadia notes. University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Box 42.1. —, (1993b), Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber.

References 115

—, (2002), ‘The forgotten revolutionary’, The Observer, 2 June. —, (2006a), Rock ‘n’ Roll. New York: Grove Press. —, (2006b), ‘The presiding spirit of Isaiah Berlin’, Lincoln Center Theater Review, Vol. 43, 5–7. Street-Porter, J (2001), ‘Over the last five years people of all ages have flocked to see the kind of art Tom Stoppard despises’, Independent, 5 June. Sullivan, D (1967), ‘Young British playwright here for rehearsal of “Rosencrantz”’, New York Times, 29 August. Taitte, L (2000), ‘Stage sees a scientific breakthrough’, Dallas Morning News, 27 October. Tinker, J (1993), ‘Another lesson in whims and conceit at the knee of too-clever Mr. Stoppard’, Daily Mail, 14 April. Tynan, Kenneth (1979), ‘Withdrawing with style from the chaos’, Show People: Profiles in Entertainment. New York: Simon and Schuster, 44–123. Vanden Heuvel, M (1993), ‘The politics of the paradigm: A case study in chaos theory’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 35, 255–266. —, (2001), ‘“Is postmodernism?”: Stoppard among/against the postmoderns’, in K E Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 213–228. Wilde, A (1987), Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Zeifman, H (2001), ‘The comedy of Eros: Stoppard in love’, in K E Kelly (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 185–200.

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Index

Adam and Eve 66, 79 Adrien, Phillipe 84 Aeschylus 58 Alley Theatre 83 Alliance Theatre 83 American Conservatory Theatre 83 Aristotle 58, 64 ‘arrow of time’ (directionality of time) 37, 50, 51, 72 Auburn, David, Proof 26 Azenberg, Emanuel 80, 81 Bakunin, Mikhail 18 Barnes, Clive 82 Beckettian 6 Belinsky, Vissarion 18, 19 Bennett, Alan, History Boys, The 19 bifurcation 50, 52, 68, 69 Billington, Michael 11, 75, 76, 77, 85, 87 Bracknell, Lady 44 Brecht, Bertolt, Life of Galileo 25 Brenton, Howard 24 Genius, The 25 Pravda 11 Brestoff, Richard, Acting Under the Circumstances 96 Briggs, John and Peat, F David 62

Bristol Old Vic 71 Broadway 13, 14, 80, 81, 82 Brook, Peter, The Man Who 25 Brown, Georgina 71, 72 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’ 45, 57, 90 Bryden, Ronald 4 ‘butterfly effect’ 49 Byatt, A. S., Possession 46, 47 Byron, Lord 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 63, 66, 77, 90, 95, 101 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 46 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 46 ‘She Walks in Beauty’ 65 Cambridge 20, 43 Canby, Vincent 81 Cats 75 Cavendish, Dominic 72 chaos theory (a.k.a. deterministic chaos) 27, 29, 30, 40, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 68, 70, 71, 79, 90, 94 Chekhovian 18 Chichester Festival Theatre 85

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Index

Churchill, Caryl 20, 24 Cloud Nine 17 Number, A 25 Top Girls 17 Clarke, Lindsay 47 Chymical Wedding, The 46 classical mind/temperament 34, 35, 36, 38, 51 Classicism/classical 28, 35, 41, 51, 55, 56, 61, 71, 77, 79 Cold War 13 Comédie Française 84 Communism 19, 20 Conrad, Joseph 3 Cousin, Geraldine, Playing for Time 73 Cultural Materialists 39 Czechoslovakia 10, 11, 19, 20

Enlightenment 36, 43, 90 entropy 50, 51 Estienne, Marie-Hélène, The Man Who 25 Euclidian 55 Euripides 58, 59 Evening Standard 11, 20, 75, 78 Feingold, Michael 82 feminist 36 Fermat, Pierre de 42, 87 fractals 50, 51, 53, 67, 79, 101 Frayn, Michael, Copenhagen 25, 26 free will 55, 68, 70

Dadaism 8 Daily Mail 76 Daily News (New York) 82 Daily Telegraph 76 de Jongh, Nicholas 75, 76, 85 determinism/deterministic 2, 6, 48, 49, 51, 55, 56, 65, 67, 68, 70, 72 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, The Physicists 25

Garden of Eden 66, 79 Gardner, Lyn 71 Gaskill, William 24 Gerard, Jeremy 81 Gitlin, Todd 21 Gleick, James, Chaos: The Making of a New Science 48, 49, 51, 53 God 7, 8, 57, 64, 66 Gosford Park 90 Gothic 29, 43, 45, 57, 88 Gross, John 76 Guardian, The 75, 76 Guercino, Et in Arcadia Ego 57 Gussow, Mel 8

Edinburgh Fringe Festival 4 Edinburgh Review 46, 87 Edson, Margaret, Wit 26 Edwardes, Jane 16 Eliot, T. S. 22

Hare, David 20, 24 Pravda 11 Hayman, Ronald 10 Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle 14 Herzen, Alexander 18, 19

Index

Highfield, Roger 53 Hobson, Harold 4 Holland, Lord 46, 87 Housman, A. E. 17, 18 humanism 23, 66, 75, 76 Hunter, Jim 2, 34, 43, 72 Independent, The 84 India 3, 16, 17 In-Yer-Face Theatre 24 iteration/iterated algorithms 29, 30, 50, 51, 52, 60, 61, 67, 94 Jackson, Kevin 57 Jacques, Damien 86 Joyce, James 8, 9, 22 Kane, Sarah 24 Kendal, Felicity 12, 16, 36, 90 Kipphardt, Heinar, In the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer 25 Kramer and Kramer 72 Kushner, Tony, Angels in America 2 Lahr, John 82 Lamb, Caroline 29, 36, 46, 63 Laplace, Pierre-Simon 55, 72 Leibniz, Gottfried 64 Leithauser, Brad 82 Lenin, Vladimir 8, 9, 10 Leonard, Robert Sean 82 Les Miserables 75 Lincoln Center 14, 19, 80 Logical Positivism 7

119

London Symphony Orchestra 10, 74 Lorrain, Claude 83 Macaulay, Alastair 85 Malaprop, Mrs 44 Mandelbrot, Benoit 53 Marber, Patrick 24 Marx, Karl 19 Marxism/Marxist 9, 12, 20, 24, 39 materialism/materialistic view of life 7, 20, 67 May, Robert 48, 49 McEwan, Ian 26 metaphysics 2, 20, 26, 41 Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman 19, 81 Milton, John 87 Mrozek, Slawomir, Tango 74 Nabokov, Vladimir 3 Nadel, Ira 3, 36, 46, 47, 75, 80 National Theatre 1, 4, 6, 8, 75, 78 National Union of Journalists 11 Neoclassical/Neoclassicism 29, 46, 79 New York (magazine) 82 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award 19, 81 New York Newsday 82 New York Post 82 New York Times 81 New Yorker 81 Newton, Isaac 32, 35, 49, 51, 55, 56, 64, 66, 67, 72, 76 Newtonian 34, 35, 38, 55, 56, 67, 68, 71, 87

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Index

Nightingale, Benedict 76, 77 Nunn, Trevor 68, 69, 70, 74, 75, 78, 80, 87, 94, 100 O’Brien, Jack 19, 80 Olivier Award 78 Osborne, John 4 Oxford 17, 40, 48 Oxford Theatre Group 4 Oxygen 27 Page, Louise 47 Adam was a Gardener 46 Panofsky, Erwin 82 Parnell, Peter, QED 25 Peacock, Thomas Love, Headlong Hall 46, 47 Peter, John 71, 76 Pinter, Harold, The Birthday Party 4 Plays and Players 7 Porusch, David 49 postmodernism 21, 22, 72 post-structuralism 61 Poussin, Nicolas 83 Et in Arcadia Ego 57, 82 Spring 79 Prague Spring 20 Pyant, Paul 78 quantum physics 13, 14, 15, 27, 61, 62 Radcliffe, Mrs, The Mysteries of Udolpho 88 Ravenhill, Mark 24

Regency 31, 53, 65, 90 relativity 27, 62 Repton, Humphrey 45, 87 Rolling Stones, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ 102 Romantic mind/temperament 17, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 51 Romanticism/romantic 18, 24, 29, 35, 36, 39, 46, 51, 52, 56, 57, 71, 77, 79, 90 Rosa, Salvator 87, 88 Royal Academy of Arts 23 Royal Court Theatre 1, 24 Royal Shakespeare Company 1, 9, 74, 75, 78 Russia/Russians 9, 13, 18, 19 Sams, Jeremy 78 science plays 1, 25–7, 47, 52 Scott, Walter 87 Second Law of Thermodynamics 32, 33, 43, 50, 51, 56, 67, 90 self-similar 50, 53, 68, 70, 79, 101 Sewell, Rufus 43 Shakespeare, William 82 Hamlet 4, 5 Shavian 9, 11 Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten, Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen 25–7 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 45–6 Simon, John 82 Sloan Foundation 26 Soares, Claire 84 socialism 10, 18, 19

Index

Soviet Union 10, 11, 19, 20 Sophocles 58, 59 Southey, ‘Medoc’ 87 ‘Thalaba’ 87 Spencer, Charles 76, 77, 78 Stanislavski, Konstantin, Creating a Role 96 Stephenson, Shelagh 26 Experiment with an Air-Pump, An 25, 27 Stokes, John 27 Stoppard, Oliver 48 Stoppard, Tom —biography 2–4 —Czech descent 2, 3 —Jewish ancestry 2 —novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon 4 —parents/step-father 2, 3 —plays Albert’s Bridge 4 Another Moon Called Earth 6 Artist Descending a Staircase 6, 23 Coast of Utopia, The 18, 19, 20, 80, 81 Critics, The 3 Enter a Free Man 3 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour 10, 74 Gamblers, The 3, 6 Galileo 25 Hapgood 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 26, 51, 74, 77, 80 In the Native State 16

121

Indian Ink 3, 15, 16, 17, 89 Invention of Love, The 17, 18, 80, 82 Jumpers 2, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 41, 71, 74 Night and Day 2, 11 Professional Foul 3, 10 Real Inspector Hound, The 3 Real Thing, The 12, 13, 71, 74, 77 Rock ‘n’ Roll 20, 24 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 47, 71 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear 4, 6 Travesties 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 17, 23, 47, 71, 74, 78 Walk on the Water, A 3 strange attractors 66 Sunday Telegraph 76 Sunday Times, The 76 Theatre Royal Haymarket 78 thermodynamics 65, 69, 72 Thiesen, Vern, Einstein’s Gift 25 Thompson, Mark 78 Time (magazine) 82 Times, The (London) 76, 77 Tinker, Jack 76 Tolstoyian 18 Toms, Carl 83 Tony Awards 19, 81, 82 Tynan, Kenneth 10 Tzara, Tristan 8, 9

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Index

United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights 23–4 University of Sussex 39 Upstairs/Downstairs 90 Vanden Heuvel, Michael 22, 61 Variety 81 Velvet Revolution 20 Victorian era 17 Village Voice 82 Virgil, Eclogues 57 Walpole, Horace 101 Castle of Otranto, The 44, 46, 87, 88 Wellcome Trust 26

Wertenbaker, Timberlake, After Darwin 25, 27 Wesker, Arnold 20 West End 1, 11, 13, 16, 78 Wilde, Alan 22 Wilde, Oscar 22, 46 Importance of Being Earnest, The 9 Wildean 9 Wilson, August 19 Wilson, Robert 22 Wood, John 47 Wood, Peter 74, 83, 84, 85 Wooster Group 22 World War I 8 Zeifman, Hersh 72