The trouble with reviewing things that friends perform in, is that if you want to bag it it gets tricky. However, Shannon was in tech crew for this one, and not officially involved artistically, so strictly speaking I’m free to rubbish it. Also, this is my first ‘high class’ review, and I may show my ignorance at any or all points as I review a play by a man demonstrably far cleverer than I.

I say demonstrably, because Arcadia is a brilliant play.

It deals (in part at least) with the opposition between personality and progress, between the intrigues of the individual and the mathematics of the universe. Straddling two time periods — and it’s well known that everything worth reading or seeing straddles at least two time periods — it explores both a tragic love story with science at its centre and the struggles of people in the present to understand the events in the past. The intelligent script hardly waits for the audience to catch up, and certainly never patronises them, as it lets us spot links and the answers to riddles with little signposting.

It also engages quite openly and in depth with many mathematical and physical concepts. This is a fairly brave step, and one I’m not in a position to judge the success of, having studied all the concepts investigated. I can’t be sure that the maths wouldn’t be alienating or irritating to a non-mathematically inclined person. It certainly worked for me.

The play gets more dramatic in the second half, where we see the characters from both time periods overlap, sharing the same space yet not interacting — with the enigmatic exception of Gus Coverly (Robert Edwards). This manages to notch up the tension and excitement without actually affecting the narrative, and leads up nicely to the melancholy final scene of Gus and Hannah dancing alongside Septimus and Thomasina.

The characters are all brilliantly drawn — and was only enhanced by the acting in the Leonardian Players’ performance. James Martin stole all his scenes as the dry Septimus Hodge, though Isabelle Brennan held her own as a pretty believable genius. Both managed to make their attraction at the end transcend age boundaries and the tutor/student relationship. Nathan Bell’s Ezra Chater was completely over the top, and went rather against the atmosphere of the piece… but then, I can’t imagine that anyone expected him to do it differently.

In the present, Kate Shearman’s affected accent as Hannah confirmed my suspicions that she is, in fact, a clone of Kate Winslet. Her anger and awkwardness were brilliantly shown. David Palliser’s sleazy, arrogant academic played against her wonderfully, and the scenes between the two were hilarious: “I was looking between her legs and saw something that reminded me of you.” Nick Stein, as usual, turned in an eccentric yet empathic performance, and Erica Johnson assumed the role of the flirty Chloe very well indeed. If there was any main criticism of the players, it was that initially many of the lines were somewhat hurried. But as the audience laughed more and more they became far more relaxed, and this became far less of a problem.

There was a funny blue screen with moving stuff in it that I think was supposed to be a window. The patterns of clouds kept on changing, but for the life of me I couldn’t actually SEE them change. This was a source of constant frustration for me. It was hard to notice the direction, but the trickier scenes were done flawlessly, so someone must have been organised somewhere…

A fascinating play, and a cut above average for the Leonardian Players.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Tuesday, April 1st, 2003. It concerns such pressing issues as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.