It has been said of Tom Stoppard that his plays excite the brain but leave the heart cold. This play, first seen in 1993, has been used as evidence to support that charge. But really the complaint can be boiled down to that crassest of English phrases: too clever by half.
Simultaneously set in the 19th and 20th centuries in the same Derbyshire mansion, the play is populated by such daunting phrases as “iterated algorithm”, “chaos theory” and “determinism”. So, yes, it does at first feel as if those who have a basic grasp of these subjects will get more out of the play while those who don’t won’t get anything.
But Stoppard, who never went to university, was no snob. Listen carefully and there is much that is explained. Take the merits, or otherwise, of the cultural movements classicism and romanticism.
The destruction of one by the arrival of the other is not just drily discussed by academics but witnessed by Lady Croom (Fiona Button), the house’s 19th-century owner who sees her beloved garden churned up by her Romantic garden designer. In place of soft grassy slopes and perfectly spaced tree avenues she is appalled to find she now has a hermitage, a fake lake and an unnecessary bridge.
Meanwhile, the mathematical technique of the aforementioned iterated algorithm becomes a spine-tingling dramatic moment that links both the play’s periods and people. Here’s how.
The modern-day house is occupied not just by the aristocratic mathematician who lives there but by academics researching different histories of the place. Hannah (Leila Farzard) is becoming increasingly obsessed by the possibility that the doodles drawn by Thomasina (Isis Hainsworth), the teenage daughter of the 19th-century occupants, had discovered a form of maths that can predict the shape of organic things such as leaves. This was centuries before the earliest known discovery of the method. Meanwhile, supremely arrogant academic Bernard has breathlessly arrived to search for evidence that neighbouring Lord Byron killed a minor poet in a duel. What fun.
Part of the genius of Stoppard’s play is that the protagonists from different centuries occupy the stage at the same time. Subplots, people and the whip-smart dialogue that spawned its own adjective in the word Stoppardian, circulate like electrons, a point made by the play’s designer Alex Eales, who suspends a three-dimensional model of atoms and their satellites.
Carrie Cracknell’s sure-footed production is beautifully acted, particularly by Seamus Dillane who as Thomasina’s Eton-educated tutor Septimus slowly has his aloof arrogance eroded by the superior intelligence of his pupil. My only gripe is that while Cracknell’s production is certainly across the play’s fizzing ideas, it never quite achieves, to full effect, its poignancy. Which is proof that Stoppard can make you feel as much as think.
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