Exciting the brain

Arcadia
Written by Tom Stoppard
Performed by the Sydney Theatre Company
Opera House Drama Theatre
Reviewed by Minnie O'Shea and Helen Jarvis

The celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard continues to excite the brain with his brilliant new play Arcadia. Set entirely within a single room of an English country mansion, the action leaps back and forth between 1809 and the present.

The location provides one of the main themes and metaphors: humans' imposition of fashions and social constructs on the landscape. As one of the present-day characters informs us: “English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour”.

Interwoven through both past and present scenarios are clashes of ideas, involving poetry, truth, mathematics and scientific inquiry. Within the characters and their debates we witness the head-on collision between reason and romance.

The plot shares much with the Booker Prize winning-novel Possession by A.S. Byatt, in its intermingling of relationships between modern-day academics and the subjects of their research in times gone by. But while Stoppard delights with his intellectual gymnastics he fails to engage the emotions as Byatt did so masterfully.

The actors, particularly Michelle Doake as Thomasina and Paul Goddard as Valentine, perform with agility under Gale Edwards' tight direction.

STC has done it again!

This article was posted on the Green Left Weekly Home Page.
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