CBR 17 BINGO: Play (because you know, theater)
My freshman year literature professor told me that you should always read a Shakespeare play through twice to really get to the heart of it. I think that’s a good rule of thumb for any worthwhile literature, and I often think about doing so, except there are too many books in the world to read and right now I’m under time constraints with CBR BINGO. But if I were going to follow her amended advice, Arcadia would be something I’d read through two or three times before I ultimately decided what I thought about it. At the very least, I think I need to see it performed to truly appreciate it.
What is Arcadia about? It takes place in a single room in an English country estate across two time periods: the early 19th century and the present day. In the 19th century, 13-year-old Thomasina discusses sex, mathematics, and the universe with her tutor Septimus. Septimus is a bit of a player and has been caught in a compromising position with the wife of one of the house guests, Ezra Chater. Meanwhile, Lady Croom is up in arms over what the landscaper wants to do to her garden. In the present day, scholars are trying to figure out what some of these characters of the 19th century were up to. Hannah Jarvis is an author who studied Byron and wrote about Caroline Lamb, one of Byron’s lovers. Bernard Nightingale was one of the scholars who ripped Jarvis’s work to shreds, but now he wants Jarvis’s help proving that Byron killed the very same Ezra Chater we met in Scene 1 (besides being a former house guest, Chater was also a cheesy poet).
This doesn’t sound like much of a plot, but trust me, there is a lot going on. Between all the love making and duel challenges, there’s lots of talk about philosophy and the universe and the meaning of life, with Thomasina proving to possess an advanced intellect for a 13-year-old. At one point in the first scene she says to Septimus, “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 as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.”
And when I was 13, I still thought Ewoks were cute.
Although Thomasina was brilliant, her contributions were lost to present-day scholars. This isn’t inherently a feminist play about women getting short shrift from history (though the implication is definitely there) so much as a play about how difficult it is to understand anything from the past. Written records are incomplete, falsified, or misconstrued all the time (there’s an example of Byron falsely claiming to have shot a rabbit in the estate’s “game book” that’s played for laughs but goes to show that even the simplest documented records can be questionable). FYI, though Byron figures prominently in this play, he isn’t a character per se–he’s somebody the rest of the characters are always talking about and, in some cases, swooning over.
The stage directions are intriguing–most of the action takes place in one room, and although the play shuttles us between two time periods, objects from each period remain on stage and are expected to be ignored. The direction notes, “During the course of the play, the table collects this and that, and where an object from one scene would be an anachronism in another (say a coffee mug) it is simply deemed to have become invisible. By the end of the play the table has collected an inventory of objects.”
This play covers heavy themes like knowledge, science, free will, classicism vs. romanticism, and even thermodynamics, but all this heaviness is wrapped up in Stoppard’s characteristic wit. I enjoyed it, but I will need to give it another read or see it performed before I let myself decide whether it’s brilliant or merely amusing.