A few weeks ago I went to see Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, with Robin Williams (this post is making my life sound so much more glamorous than is really the case), and although it had excellent moments, overall I thought it used big, dramatic events as a cut-rate way of getting emotional responses that the writing, plot, and characters didn’t merit. Whereas Arcadia does just the opposite. It has an elaborate, well-managed plot, interesting (apart from Chloe) characters, and writing that makes me rethink my long-held position that “the dialogue crackles” is a stupid turn of phrase. It takes tiny, insignificant objects and events and gives the characters (and the audience) a tremendous investment in them. A pencil portrait and a lit candle brought tears to my eyes in the final scene.

I’m not describing the final scene, although I want to. I’ve made this distinction before, I believe: I am mad about factual spoilers (X dies, Y and Z marry), but I want to discover the emotional beats for myself. I’ll just say, the final scene of Arcadia can hardly be described in words other than “heartbreakingly lovely.” Please read it, or if you are in New York, go see it! It is worth it, worth it, worth it! Just for the last scene it’s worth it. I’m going again in May. Don’t judge.

Billy Crudup, the reason I went to see the production (that is such a lie, I’d have gone to see it if Robin Williams had played Bernard Nightingale — or no, maybe not — well, yes, I probably would have), played Bernard Nightingale as a semi-caricature of an academic. It was extremely funny, because you’ve had that professor, but there was something slightly insincere about the way Crudup played the part. I’m having trouble making the distinction between the insincerity the character possesses, and the insincerity of the way Crudup played the part, and where the problem was. I think it’s this: Bernard-the-character treats academia as a rhetorical game he’s playing, but a game in which he has (however much he jokes about it) a serious stake. Crudup’s Bernard lacks the stake. It’s insincerity all the way down.

This, plus the gaspy Lia Williams, who subscribes to the gasp-emote-repeat style of dialogue delivery as Hannah (shouldn’t Hannah be brisk?), rendered the modern sections of the play less satisfying than they might otherwise have been. Fortunately they had Raul Esparza playing Valentine, making longish expository speeches about science resonate (his Valentine has a stake in it, and it shows). Then, too, the payoff of the modern scenes is not, as in the scenes set in the 1800s, the relationships between the characters, but rather the solving of the mystery of the past. This aspect of the play could not have been written or staged to better effect. As Hannah tells Valentine, “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.”

Tom Riley was absolutely superb, flawless, ideal, as Septimus Hodge. I worried at the beginning that he and Thomasina were too shouty, and Thomasina was, but about him I shouldn’t have had a moment’s concern. Septimus is the play’s center – the Byron connection, the turtle owner, the genius (-spotter) of the house of Sidley, the wry un-self-pitying lover of Chater and Croom – and Riley carries it all off with quiet humor. He’s making jokes to himself, not to the audience, and that is why they’re funny. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway because I’d have forgiven him anything after the last scene (I can’t describe it, there’s no use asking me to describe it; if describing it did it justice I’d have been gushing like this after reading the play).

(What’s that you say? I was gushing like this after reading the play? Okay, yes, I was, but not about that final scene.)

Thomasina, on the other hand, is a little shrill. I was glancing back at my post on reading Arcadia, and I am unduly pleased with myself by something I said in a comment: “Every time I read this play, I think it would be so easy to play Thomasina shrill, for laughs. She’s a funny character, but she’s only funny as long as the actress playing her commits to playing it straight.” Solid call, Past Jenny! Bel Powley plays Thomasina shrill, for laughs. The writing carries her, or Septimus does, but it would have been far better if the actress had committed to playing her straight, without the cartoony hand-waving. I know that it would have been better because she dispensed with the shrillness and excessive hand gestures in the last scene, and it was better to a factor of infinity.

I’m going again. I don’t care! I’m going again, if I can in any way afford to. I have to see this play again. Also, if anyone reading this happens to be in charge of the universe, I want The Invention of Love to be revived. I would go see it no matter what it cost, probably twice, and I would tell my friends about it. Promise!

Going to see good theater in New York City ranks very high on Bentham’s hedonic calculus (first encountered in this book, wow, ages ago). Intensity, or strength of pleasure, very high. Duration, three hours or so, better than most pleasurable things, right, so let’s call it pretty high. Certainty (that it will be pleasurable), pretty solid if you’re me and are addicted to live theater. Propinquity, just across town. Fecundity (likeliness to recur), excellent, and the more theater I see the more I want to see, so this gets better as it goes. Purity (meaning, you won’t feel shitty afterwards — binge-drinking rates low on purity), excellent, I am still buzzing from Arcadia. Extent (how many people share in the pleasure?), superb, a whole theater full of people will share it with you. By contrast, cooking dinner rates pretty low. Intensity is low, duration is low, propinquity and fecundity good, purity medium, extent poor, and certainty very poor indeed. If I starve to death in New York City it’ll be because I spent my money on theater tickets instead of groceries.

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When pressed, though*, I can only think of one such novel that I would recommend to a friend, and then only if I knew the friend in question didn’t mind extreme wordiness.  (A.S. Byatt’s Possession.  I should read that again.  It’s been years.)  More often I am disappointed on an epic scale by the author’s failure to live up to some arbitrary and impossibly high standard for this kind of novel.

*By me.  Much as I would like to live the sort of life where book lovers from all over the nation are constantly bashing at my door trying to get my opinion on Important Literary Matters, I am not yet at that place in my life.  Give it time.

For reasons far too complicated** to go into here, I am binging on Tom Stoppard right now.  I started with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, moved on to The Invention of Love, the result of which you saw, and just finished the play I normally claim as my favorite, Arcadia.  Arcadia goes back and forth between Byron-times, when a thirteen-year-old girl called Thomasina contemplates Latin translations and carnal embrace under the instruction of her tutor Septimus Hodge (that sounds much dirtier than it is), and present times, when scholars research Thomasina’s family and try to work out whether Byron ever shot a poet at their house.

**And awesome.  I would tell you what they are, except that I’m afraid that if I did, my sister’s boyfriend would no longer be able to write that treatise on Tom Stoppard and the nature of art that I expect he is currently planning, and also that Tom Stoppard’s people (I’m assuming he has people.  He’s Tom Stoppard.) would find this post, take umbrage at my flippant tone, and decline to allow Tom Stoppard to be interviewed by anyone ever again.  Better safe than sorry, right?

No wonder other books of this type have failed to satisfy me!  I have been comparing them all this time against Tom Stoppard!  It is hardly fair.  Especially when you consider that Billy Crudup, on whom I have a massive crush from Charlotte Gray and Almost Famous, played Septimus at one point in his career; and Bill Nighy, on whom I have a massive man-crush*** from, well, everything, was the original Bernard; and both of them are playing those roles in my head when I read Arcadia.  It’s like saying, Oh hey, I traveled back in time and saw the original production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe with William Shakespeare playing Oberon, so WHY CAN’T YOU MEASURE UP, NEIL GAIMAN?****

***My little sister and I got fed up with having no word to describe our feelings for male actors we adore but don’t have crushes on.  We can say “crush” to describe how we feel about Ben Barnes, and “girl-crush” to describe how we feel about Carey Mulligan and Helen Mirren, but there is no word for how we feel about Nathan Fillion and Johnny Depp.  So we decided to say “man-crush”.  It is officially the most useful word I coined in the 2009 holiday season (with “snuddle” a close if nauseating second).

****Confession: Before I ever saw a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I read Susan Cooper’s heart-wrenching King of Shadows, in which a lonely orphan boy travels back to Shakespeare times to play Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Shakespeare takes care of him.  While playing Oberon.  I think that may actually be why I have never seen a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that satisfied me.  That, or the Royal Shakespeare Company is massively overrated.

Arcadia gives us alternating scenes in past and present, gradually unfolding the little drama that took place in the old days between a poet called Chater and another called Byron.  Stoppard manages to maintain intellectual and emotional suspense while exploring chaos theory, the intersection of science and humanities, and the limits of human knowledge.  While, also, being very funny:

Thomasina: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?

Septimus: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.

Thomasina: Is that all?

Septimus: No…a shoulder of mutton, a haunch of venison well-hugged, an embrace of grouse…caro, carnis, feminine: flesh.

Thomasina: Is it a sin?

Septimus: Not necessarily, my lady, but when carnal embrace is sinful it is a sin of the flesh.  QED.  We had caro in our Gaulic Wars: ‘The Britons live on milk and meat’ – ‘lacte et carne vivunt’.  I am sorry the seed fell on stony ground.

Thomasina: That was the sin of Onan, wasn’t it, Septimus?

Septimus: Yes.  He was giving his brother’s wife a Latin lesson and she was hardly the wiser after it than before.

Phew.  Dizzy from all the wordplay.

Tom Stoppard, y’all.  Arcadia.  I almost got to see it in London but then did not, and I really wished I had organized my schedule better.  It’s a magnificent example of the above-mentioned double-plotline sort of story, the standard to which all others of this type should aspire.

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