Beyond Arcadia Part 1

Stage Manager for ARCADIA and Tom Stoppard aficionado Debs Ramser discovered a little gem of an on-line E-Zine with some interesting insight on the play. Here are some interesting reflections from the director of that production.

“What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.”

Rehearsal is a process of discovery. And interestingly enough, what we discovered, as we rehearsed Arcadia is that the play itself is about the process of discovery.

It asks the questions mankind has been asking ever since we wiped the primordial soup of our shoes. Who are we? Why are we here? What’s it all about?

But fear not. Since it’s Tom Stoppard who’s doing the asking, the funny bone is engaged as frequently as the mind.

Part detective story, part love story, part comedy of errors, Arcadia is also a crash course in mathematics, landscape gardening, literature, Romantic poetry, the second law of thermodynamics, oh, and lest things should get dull, chaos theory. The action is set in the schoolroom of Sidley Park, Derbyshire, inhabited by the Coverly family in the early 19th century, and simultaneously in the present day by their descendants Valentine, Chloe and the ever-silent Gus.

While a wildly comic series of events unfolds in 1809 and 1812, involving, among other things, Romantic trysts in gazebos, duels at dawn, mysterious hermits, rice pudding, mediocre poets, steam heated engines and overheated aristocrats, a pair of rival literary researchers works doggedly and with haphazard success, to unravel them in the present.

Will we ever find out what really happened? Is it possible to really know the past?

Is it possible to really know anything? What Arcadia taught us is it’s not the answers that matter. It’s asking the questions. As Hannah Jarvis observes, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”

It doesn’t matter that we’re all looking for different things. And that being human and fallible, we don’t always get it right. That we chase after red herrings and chimera, led by our hearts as often as our heads. Faced with the possibility that, after all our striving, we may never know the answers. That the “theory of everything” will always elude us. That there will always be an unknowable mystery at the heart of things -- like a fifteen year old boy who never speaks.

But we keep looking because we want to know.

We hope you find the search as exhilarating as we do.

Ave Lawyer


ARCADIA plays at our Rice Village Location through June 6.

And that's the word on the street!