ARCADIA
Arcadia is a mountainous district in the Peloponnese, the domain of the shepherd god Pan, and is taken as the exemplar of rural contentment. The Roman poet Virgil populates Arcadia with young shepherds and poets in his Eclogues. The phrase ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, as quoted by Lady Croom, first appeared in a 17th century picture by Guercino. It depicts a skull which has been found by shepherds, with an inscription which translates as ‘Even in Arcadia there am I’ [Death]. Lady Croom misinterprets the phrase to suggest a kind of utopian happiness, though Septimus later correctly ascribes its much darker aspect. The phrase resounds throughout the play, with a strong degree of poignancy.
THOMASINA: Am I waltzing? SEPTIMUS: Yes, my lady. In ARCADIA, Oxford-educated Septimus Hodge (played here by Edwin Wright) comes to Sidley Park in 1809 to become the private tutor of Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen years and ten months.
He occupies his spare time, apparently, by seducing every female on the premises, from the redoubtable Lady Croom to Mrs Ezra Chater, the wife of an execrable poet whose latest work Septimus has agreed to review.
He narrowly avoids fighting a duel with Chater over the matter, cunningly finding the man's achilles heel and playing up to it.
He was friends at University with Lord Byron.
THOMASINA: Lord Byron was amusing at breakfast. He paid you a tribute, Septimus.
SEPTIMUS: Did he?
THOMASINA: He said you were a witty fellow, and he had almost by heart an article you wrote about - well, I forget what.
Thomasina (played by Serena Cotton) is a mathematical genius, far ahead of her time. Septimus encourages her to work on a solution to Fermat's last theorem, to keep her quick mind from prying into more delicate areas.
THOMASINA: Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?
SEPTIMUS: We do. THOMASINA: What a faint heart! We must work outward from the middle of the maze. We will start with something simple. (She picks up an apple leaf.) I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation. You will be famous for being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten.
We move from 1809 to the present day, when Sidley Park is inhabited by the descendants of those we met earlier, and by Hannah Jarvis, a scholar researching the garden and also the mysterious hermit of Sidley Park. Who was he? Was he insane? What was he trying to prove by scribbling endless algebraic calculations for the last twenty years of his life, alone in the hermitage with only the company of his pet tortoise, Plautus.
Hannah's safe territory is invaded by rival academic Bernard Nightingale, who is determined to prove from the evidence he has that Lord Byron killed Ezra Chater in a duel at Sidley Park in April 1809, following the bad reviews of Chater's poetry that he believes Byron wrote in the Piccadilly Recreation. After much suspicion and verbal fencing, they agree to each continue their own line of research, aided by mathematician Valentine Coverly, who is researching the Sidley Park game books as his own project.
Hannah & Valentine discuss chaos theory, watched by Valentine's younger brother Gus, who never speaks.
As the world of the play moves back and forth between the two eras, the audience gradually comes to understand the complex series of interlinked events that will bring them to the truth of the matter. As with chaos theory, random events intervene to shape lives. Stoppard explores how we can and cannot know the past, how chaos both creates and undercuts our intellectual systems, and how erotic desire pushes us on, we know not where.
Septimus and Jellaby the butler discuss the unusual events of the previous night in scene 6.
In ARCADIA, Oxford-educated Septimus Hodge (played here by Edwin Wright) comes to Sidley Park in 1809 to become the private tutor of Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen years and ten months.
Thomasina (played by Serena Cotton) is a mathematical genius, far ahead of her time. Septimus encourages her to work on a solution to Fermat's last theorem, to keep her quick mind from prying into more delicate areas.
