I didn’t breathe a word of my true reaction while filing into the top-floor bar of the Old Vic theatre last week after the three-hour production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was over. It would have been mortifying to be overheard muttering any adverse comments, when swaths of intellectual Stoppard-lovers from all over London and the Home Counties were crowding on to the staircase. Stoppard is a national treasure and to say anything rude about his work, especially in the three months after his death, would be heresy.
It was only on the pavement walking towards Waterloo that I dared to say to my husband: ‘I must say, I wasn’t moved by it. I mean, I didn’t really care about any of the characters. I know we’re meant to be feeling dazzled by his wit and brilliance, but for some reason I just feel tired out.’
A few minutes later, sitting on the Jubilee Line, my husband said to me, confidentially, among other comments: ‘The second half was too long.’ The woman on the other side of him overheard, and said, ‘I agree’. We struck up an instant bond. The couple opposite, clutching their theatre programme full of helpful explanations about Fermat’s Last Theorem and iterative algorithms, gave us a warm smile.
Relief all round, till this small Arcadia-going sample dispersed at Westminster. Perhaps hundreds of home-goers were secretly feeling the same.
Goodness, the second half did drag. I remember laughing out loud once, early in the first half. It was when Captain Brice said to Thomasina’s tutor Septimus in an 1809 scene: ‘As her tutor, you have a duty to keep her in ignorance.’ Hooray! That’s funny! Here I am, actively enjoying a Stoppard play and being entertained and dazzled!
I didn’t laugh out loud at the play’s opening exchange – ‘Septimus, what is carnal embrace?’ ‘Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef’ – though lots of others did. But I smiled and was hopeful, although disappointed that there was no scenery, just a table and some chairs and stools with elliptical lighting above a circular, slowly rotating stage.
We were high up in the Baylis Circle, along with hundreds of other middle-aged people who chose to spend £50 rather than £75 and who, like us, had bought sandwiches for the interval. We had to bend forward and concentrate like mad. The production was ‘in the round’, so where the back of the stage should have been, there was just more audience, like us, staring down 100 feet below and concentrating.
Much as we revere the man, have we lost our thirst for his rather wordy, multi-subject intellectual dazzlement?
‘Fermat’s Last Theorem, by contrast, asserts that, when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.’ At first, I felt flattered by this kind of repartee. I liked to think of the handsome, louche Stoppard chain-smoking at his desk, writing this stuff aimed at exactly people like me: arts graduates who like to be exhilarated, stretched and taken out of our comfort zone with intriguing titbits of high maths and science, and to feel for a fleeting moment that we almost ‘get’ it, even though it’s way beyond anything we did for O-level.
But is it really so much fun, two hours in? By the second half, especially during the 1989 scenes (the play switches back and forward between two time zones, two centuries apart), when Bernard Nightingale gives Hannah, Valentine and Chloe a long preview of his lecture about his (misplaced) theory that Byron shot and killed Chater in a duel in 1809, I wished Stoppard had edited it all down a bit.
When I got home, I realised we had been at a preview, so there were no reviews yet in which to search for vindication. I had to wait till the morning after press night to see whether any critics would be brazen enough to be less than ecstatic. And hallelujah! Clive Davis of the Times wrote: ‘There were more than a few moments during this evening when the lengthy disquisitions on the nature of the universe left me feeling as slow and ponderous as the tortoise that serves as one of the mischievous props.’ You had to read to the end of Patrick Marmion’s four-star review in the Daily Mail to find the killer sentence: ‘In the end, I found myself increasingly a victim of entropy: the universal law that says everything eventually runs out of gas … even Tom Stoppard.’
He really does. I remember seeing the play when it was first on in London in 1993 and finding it hard work then. I had hoped I might have matured by now, but – rather like when you go to a school reunion and meet people you didn’t like as a child and find you still don’t like them now – Stoppard’s play had the same exhausting effect the second time round.
Much as we revere the man – and we do – for his charm, modesty and verbal brilliance, have we lost our thirst for his rather wordy, multi-subject intellectual dazzlement? In the 1990s, there was perhaps more of a taste for literary showmen, such as Stoppard and Martin Amis, whose works we enjoyed most for their verbal acrobatics. The great television dramas of the past 30 years have answered and slaked our thirst for complex characters who engage our emotions. The characters in Arcadia seem rather thin by comparison.
I hear that Indian Ink, the other Stoppard play which has just finished its run at the Hampstead theatre, was also hard-going and for ‘Stoppard completists only’. It did have Felicity Kendal in it but, seeing as it was two hours and 45 minutes long, I didn’t think I could face it.
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