Bedlam veterans Shaun Taylor-Corbett and Caroline Grogan are tutor Septimus Hodge and his brilliant pupil Thomasina Coverly in the 19th-century storyline of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
Tom Stoppard, whose 1993 comedy Arcadia is being revived by Bedlam, turned 86 last summer and, to the extent discernible from afar, he’s going strong. A year ago Stoppard was in New York for the premiere of Leopoldstadt, an emotionally charged, multigenerational epic. That late-career masterwork, set in Vienna during the Holocaust, proved surprising, even for a playwright who’s known to avoid doing anything twice. Arcadia, when new, was also a surprise. It represents the dramatist in midcareer, his imagination careening among a wild assortment of topics: English landscape gardening, quantum physics, the theory of deterministic chaos, and the peril for researchers of what’s inscrutable in the historical record (as, for example, gaps in the biography of George Gordon, Lord Byron, an important offstage character).
Elan Zafir plays Bernard Nightingale, a narcissistic, hypercompetitive academic in the 20th-century plotline of Arcadia. Photographs by Ashley Garrett.
Arcadia chronicles doings at Sidley Park, the stately Derbyshire home of an ancient English family, the Coverlys, with the dramatic action toggling back and forth between the first decade of the 19th century and the final decade of the 20th. In the Jane Austen-ish world of the earlier story, the Enlightenment is yielding to the Romantic Era, with classical aesthetics being displaced by a popular taste for the picturesque. The Coverlys are following fashion by plowing up their gracefully landscaped grounds to create an artificial wilderness that one of the play’s 20th-century characters describes as “the Gothic novel expressed in landscape,” inclusive of “everything but [the] vampires.”
In Stoppard’s pastiche of 18th-century comedy, recent Cambridge graduate Septimus Hodge (Shaun Taylor-Corbett) is tutoring the Coverlys’ adolescent daughter Thomasina (Caroline Grogan) while simultaneously pursuing amours with the manor’s chatelaine (Lisa Birnbaum) and a houseguest (like Lord Byron, an offstage character). Thomasina, possessing a precocious intellect, is puzzling over the phenomenon of entropy (for which the English language of the Georgian period doesn’t yet have a word). Her natural curiosity about sex (she quaintly speaks of “carnal embrace”) threatens to undermine her focus on scientific problem-solving.
“[Director Eric] Tucker has added an immersive aspect to the fleetly paced proceedings.”
Ultimately, though, Thomasina’s intellectual quest is thwarted by practical limitations that later scientists and mathematicians, such as Valentine Coverly (Mike Labbadia), will overcome with calculators and computers. As Valentine observes 200 years later: “in 18-whatever nobody knew more about heat” than his distant relative Thomasina and her tutor; yet no one then had capacity to formulate a scientific account of the second law of thermodynamics.
In the later narrative skein, set during the administration of Prime Minister John Major, professional scholars Hannah Jarvis (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and Bernard Nightingale (Elan Zafir) compete to unearth details of what happened at Sidley Park during the Georgian era, including what Septimus, Thomasina, and the Coverlys’ guest Lord Byron were up to. The scholars (Stoppard’s satiric take on careerist pretensions among academicians) are comically off the beam in what they conclude from their wishful, sometimes haphazard, analyses.
Zuzanna Szadkowski is Hannah, a 20th-century scholar attempting to piece together what happened at Sidley Park, a Derbyshire stately home, approximately 200 years earlier.
Over the last 11 years, director Eric Tucker and his Bedlam troupe have put an idiosyncratic stamp on plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw, with varying degrees of effectiveness. In previous productions, cast members have often delivered lines in outlandish ways that suggest they’re acting out their perception of subtext, as when the agitated Hedda of Bedlam’s 2022 Hedda Gabler bounced up and down on a sofa like an unsupervised toddler while lamenting the disappointments of conjugal life. The superb cast of Arcadia takes no such liberties with Stoppard’s dialogue, and the playwright’s farcical text turns out to be surprisingly amenable to Bedlam’s roistering style and the company’s espoused commitment to exploring “the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience.” In apparent acknowledgment of Stoppard’s interest in chaos theory, Tucker has added an immersive aspect to the fleetly paced proceedings, with a couple of actors disrupting a row of spectators in the first half and the performers taking over the auditorium in the second half, relegating the audience to the stage. Overall, the production is a strikingly intimate rendering of a comedy of ideas that, with 13 characters and its juxtaposition of disparate time periods, is usually staged on a grand scale.
Arcadia impressed early audiences with the vast array of Stoppard’s interests and the clever way his dramaturgy toys with time. The current revival brings the action very close to the playgoers and makes aspects of the script, disdained by some as hyperintellectual and bloodless three decades ago, seem more poignant and heartfelt than before. What’s eye-opening is that Stoppard’s gargantuan buffet is so satisfying when served as a cozy picnic.
The Bedlam production of Arcadia runs through Jan. 7 at the West End Theater (263 W. 86th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 1 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. For tickets, visit bedlam.org; for information, email info@bedlam.org.
Playwright: Tom Stoppard
Direction: Eric Tucker
Sets: John McDermott
Lighting: Les Dickert
Costumes: Charlotte Palmer-Lane
