By Julietta Gramigni
★★★★★
Having already studied Arcadia, a play first performed in 1993, I descended the stairs to the LSESU Venue on closing night expecting to be greeted by a perhaps overly familiar three-hour-long production. However, Tom Stoppard’s genius of constructing a play built by two timelines, a large cast of characters, and unending intellectual discussion allows for constant new discoveries.
From the very first line – ‘Septimus, what is carnal embrace?’ – the audience was swept into what promised to be an engaging comedy of puns, cross-talking, and dazzling but faulty rhetoric. Excellent acting from leads such as Konstantin Burgess (Septimus Hodge) meant that potentially awkward moments of prop issues or even strange, off-set banging sounds became part of the comedy of the play. The challenge of several actors and timelines onstage played out wonderfully, reflecting the chaos as well as duality of ideas being discussed.
With a play such as Arcadia, there is a risk of losing the audience; its exploration of quantum mechanics, chaos mathematics, and an elaborate plot of the present trying to uncover the past certainly doesn’t deem it the most accessible. However, the strong line delivery and passionate acting ensured consistent laughter and engagement from the audience.
At the same time, the more tragic, serious matters of life Arcadia asks us to consider are delivered with careful attention. Rebecca Stanton (Thomasina) performs a soliloquy-like speech on the ‘grief’ that is loss of knowledge. Moreover, the surprising addition of a final line confirming Septimus as ‘the hermit of Sidley Park’ serves as a painful nod to his fate living out the rest of his days trying to express the mathematical theories of his student.
After curtain-fall, the director Leo Taussig addressed what he sees as LSE’s failure to value creative pursuits alongside the more academic interests of the university. In particular, students feel there is often not an adequate provision of space for the projects of visual art and drama. Arcadia certainly teaches us that literature and art are not separate from the world of science and mathematics: a lesson the LSE should listen more closely to.
Photo by Annie Jiang
