Sport - Rugby School

Drama & Music
2009/10
Drama
&Music
The School Play: Arcadia
Arcadia is everything from a crude romp through
the backstairs delights of early nineteenth-century
sexuality, via peevish satire on contemporary
academic mores, to reverent celebration of the
sacrifices love makes to genius. Not very much
happens onstage – it is a form of theatrical
chamber music which relies on an audience whose intelligence
Stoppard at times flatters, and then puts through an intellectual
assault course of allusion, shifting time frames and virtuosic
paranomastic dialogue, all of which, presided over by the
metaphor of the landscaped garden, opens at key moments
to reveal the omnipresence of death and the imminence of
decadence in every version of arcadian pastoral.
For all of these reasons this is a ferociously difficult play to
produce in a way which will convincingly convey the multiplicity
of theme and reference and keep all members of the audience
amused, provoked and challenged rather than exasperated; it is
a credit to Max Pappenheim’s fastidious attention to detail and
the ability of the cast to rise to his vision that this engaged all of
the audience in different ways.
Jack Sardeson as Septimus cleverly balanced his persona as the
essentially vulnerable if apparently cocksure serial adulterer,
whose intelligence ultimately leads him to recognise the genius
in his pupil and turn himself into a living computer to prove
her theories after her death. Sophie Boorman as Tomasina
matched this by evoking from the beginning the tragic sense
of a kind of lucid brilliance that requires innocence to guarantee
its vision – first by seeing though Septimus’s increasingly
panicky etymological evasions, and then by discovering the
mathematical set which will only be fully realized when picked
up in the ‘contemporary’ part of the play by Valentine Coverly.
Hugh Johnson Gilbert captured the way in which this character
assumes an apparently slipshod aristocratic unconcern, and,
as his (presumably genetically determined) genius comes
through, turns it into another form of innocence which echoes
Tomasina’s. Hannah Jarvis often reflects Septimus himself in the
modern period, and in a performance that rose magnificently
to the demands that Stoppard places on his actors, Abi Ribbans
ranged from scandalized incredulity, to amusement transforming
to precisely aimed denunciation in often breathtakingly rapid
succession.
Set against these are Chater, and his modern counterpart
Bernard Nightingale, both in different but complementary ways
commenting on the way society is always more concerned
with epiphenomena than the secret decoding of the universe
going on in hermitages. Tom Wiegman was very skilful in his
portrayal of a man reduced to cuckolded idiocy by Septimus,
managing at times to achieve a genuine sympathy underneath
the uncomprehending bluff gentry persona. Pip Schlee’s
Captain Brice complemented this performance with gun toting,
outraged curmudgeonly zeal. Nightingale as the contemporary
academic hopelessly in love with the media rather than the truth
is mercilessly pilloried but Arthur Thomas managed to dramatise
a character that one has to despise without falling into the trap
of outright caricature, and carrying it off with unselfconscious
brio. His scenes with Abi Ribbans were among the many high
points of the production.
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