Mastering “Arcadia”
By ERIC GRODE
Early in Arcadia, Tom Stoppard’s beguiling mashup of academic one-upsmanship, fractals, Lord Byron, landscape gardening, Fermat’s last theorem, duels, chaos theory and a handful of other matters, a 19th-century tutor named Septimus Hodge stares at a tortoise that lives in the country house where he is employed. Then he orders it to sit.
“I find it interesting that he had university lecturers address the cast of the original production,” Riley continues. “Now he just says, ‘Make the joke funnier.’”
This focus on the more accessible elements of Stoppard’s initially forbidding text is a priority both for Stoppard and for director David Leveaux, who directed a well-received revival of the play last year in London and has recast it entirely for the New York run, which opens March 17 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Aside from Tony nominee Lia Williams (Skylight), the only British actors are Riley and Bel Powley, who plays Septimus’s precocious young pupil, Thomasina Coverly. (The 13-year-old Thomasina essentially invents/discovers at least two of the things listed above.)
Powley, 19, wanted a rudimentary background in the mathematical and scientific theories that Thomasina discusses so adroitly. “My first concern was that I needed to understand everything I was saying before I could begin to think of relationships or characters or anything else,” she says.
Riley adds, “We tried to get a handle on Fermat’s last theorem as much as you can as a layman as opposed to an academic. But actually, although I agree with Bel to a point, understanding the theories to the nth degree mattered less to me than understanding how those theories affect the relationships in the play.”
For Riley, mastery of the time-hopping text has been an ongoing process. “I would hope that I don’t completely get it until the final week,” he says, “because I hope to be adding to it as I go.” Both agree that Stoppard’s presence in first week of rehearsals was invaluable on this score.
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Eric Grode, the author of the recently released “Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation” (Running Press), was theatre critic at the New York Sun from 2005 to 2008.