THEATRE PREVIEW
Theatre Junction
Opens November 21
Dr. Betty Mitchell Theatre
Arcadia is back and intellectual as ever
Theatre Junction remounts Tom Stoppard's play of discovery
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is not the kind of play that lets you sit back and relax. From the early discussion of Fermat’s last theorem to the later debates over Newtonian physics, it’s an elegant intellectual exercise from the first words to the last. A bit of a mouthful, too, for the actors.
"Certainly the science of it is something that takes some time to wrap your mind around," says Jonathan Goad, one of the leads in Theatre Junction’s remounting of the play they first staged in the 1997-98 season. "Even just to put yourself in the mindset of how they’re thinking about the world is hard."
Part of the play is set in the 19th century, and Goad’s character is Septimus Hodge, tutor to the precocious young Thomasina Coverly, who is in the midst of discovering principles of math and physics that confound her elders. TJ ensemble member Meg Roe plays Thomasina, and says that she also felt a bit out of touch with the scientific observations her character is so familiar with.
"They’re all being drawn from what is around us, and what was around them in 1809 as well, so it’s not hard to imagine imagining," she says. "It’s only the practicality of figuring it out that takes a minute."
Goad has brother who’s a math whiz, so he had some help when it came to research for the play, but he jokes that he’s still not entirely up to speed.
"It’s good for me (as Septimus) because I’m two steps behind Thomasina," he says. "So I get to look at things and be confused, which I literally am, so it works out great."
Roe also got a helping hand from a couple of siblings with some science smarts, and she says it’s enough to give her a handle on the character, but she’ll never be a prodigy like Thomasina. She adds, though, that the point of the story isn’t the scientific minutiae, after all.
"I think that was Stoppard’s intention, really," she says. "There is all this great math going on in the play, but the important stuff is the relationships between the people, and the excitement that they get from thinking of all these love discoveries and math discoveries and science discoveries."
The play moves rapidly back and forth between Thomasina’s growing knowledge of life and love, and a parallel epiphany happening in the present day. That’s the plot that features Shauna Baird and Doug McKeag, who are the only cast members returning from the first production. Each of the characters has an intellectual quest that plays out against the background of all of the others.
"It (asks) whether the pursuit of knowledge is really useful to us, or how much knowledge we need," Goad explains. "Or if we find all the knowledge, if we crack the genetic code – that’s the modern parallel – we’ll be able to clone each other, and will we have lost the mysteries which make us thrive, and add that spark to life that you can’t put your finger on?"
Roe takes up that thread enthusiastically. She’s been fascinated by recent media reports of the scientific search for the soul.
"If you can genetically clone a sheep or a human, or whatever, where does the weight of the mind come in?" she asks. "Where does the soul come in, and can you recreate that? And it’s actually math and quantum physics that they’re using to try and figure out what a soul is, and where a soul lives. It’s fascinating. Totally non-understandable, but fascinating." |
