We might feel a tad confused when he makes his first entry…
This is Valentine (played by Mike Labbadia). He wears a striped bathrobe and headsets that one can imagine are tuned into heavy metal—or later we might think he’s rapt in a high-density lecture by a fellow mathematician. It’s not just his fast but plodding gait. It’s that this man with spiked platinum hair who sports a T-shirt that says OCCUPY MARS is making his way through a salon at the turn of the 18th Century. In that time and space, a tutor, Septimus Hodge played by Shaun Taylor-Corbett, is trying to distract his precocious charge, Thomasina played by Caroline Grogan. Thomasina wants to know what “carnal embrace” means and whether it was true that he was in one with her mother. When mincing words comes up short, he assigns her an unsolvable math problem.
A roaming anachronism, Valentine might be thought of as a metaphor for the script’s ruminations on chaos and how patterns from another time and space are at work even if we don’t see them as so. Scientific texts often explain chaos theory by referencing the proverbial butterfly in one continent that flutters its wings in such a way that it causes a rain storm on the other side of the ocean. Tom Stoppard’s explications are instead word-laden– very, very, very word-laden.
This reach across time is a two-way street. Two competitors for academic kudos and fame (Bernard Nightingale played by Elan Zafir and Hannah Jarvis played by Zuzanna Szadkowski) are visitors to Valentine’s family estate to verify and document their theories on Lord Byron or a hermit that might be more legend than real. Meanwhile Valentine combs tomes of hunting records in the estate to advance his computational theories about birds and biology.
Bedlam Assembles a Large Cast
Add a cheeky butler, a foppish and vain cuckolded husband and his promiscuous wife, a sexpot sister, a mute brother, Lord Byron too (though we never see him), and more. Stoppard gets to use these characters to make tangents on tangents of commentary. You too might find yourself thinking you are only grasping its headlines, rather than the full grok. There’s sex too– or at least talk of such. There are light moments for sure, like when you find yourself laughing loudly as Carole King lyrics make their way into the script with an inflection by Szadkowski that might be dubbed the “When Harry Met Sally I’ll have what she’s having” 2.0.
Arcadia, winner of Tony, Olivier, Drama Desk Awards among others, is a must-see for anyone with a deep interest in modern British theater. For those of us who like their theater more emotive than cerebral, this might not be your top pick.
