Arcadia: Press Preview

It will be hard to stop Stoppard’s Arcadia being a major success.

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‘Milk and Two Sugars’ brings Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia to the Oxford Playhouse in 1st Week.

Arcadia follows 13-year-old Thomasina Coverly in 1809, making a scientific discovery that will change the way people understand the world, while desire, passion and literary rivalry preoccupy the other characters.

Meanwhile in 1993 academics Bernard and Hannah unpick the illicit secrets of the estate and uncover the events of 184 years previously, all under the derisive eye of the current occupant, a young mathematician.

Director James Fennemore leads an energetic warm-up

The Tab went along hoping to snooze through a couple of scenes before dinner, but we were immediately thrown into a series of over-zealous warm up games. Perhaps they hoped we’d then be too tired to notice any slip-ups.

If this was the case, they needn’t have worried. Even though we saw excerpts a couple of weeks before production, what we saw left us eagerly anticipating the full performance.

David Shields and Phoebe Hames

David Shields as Septimus Hodge looks set to steal the show. Or at least the 1809 half of it.

He manipulated the stage with an assurance that would have shown up a lesser cast, but was fortunately matched by a suitably naive yet prodigious Thomasina (Amelia Sparling), and their rapport was at once captivating and very funny.

The little bit of Nick Williams’ Ezra Chater we saw also promises great things.

Jump forward to 1993 and The Winterling (TT’13) co-stars Peter Huhne and Carla Kingham deliver another engaging performance, ensuring that the academic discussions in the play don’t make you feel like you’re trapped in yet another tutorial.

Director James Fennemore  said that it is the play’s ‘beating human heart’ which makes it great. Whilst this is true, the play’s cleverness and range of ideas and themes it covers – demonstrated, for example, by using rice pudding to elucidate chaos theory – also entertains.

 

We didn’t see the whole play, or even every character, but strong performances from Ed Barr-Simm as Bernard Nightingale and a typically intense cameo from Jo Allan (Jellaby) left us keen to see more and find out how the interaction between the two time periods develops.

Fennemore hopes the audience will be sympathetic to the possibility that “it’s the best possible time to be alive – when everything you thought you knew is wrong“. This will surely appeal, but we feel convinced that this A* cast will triumph over even Stoppard’s words.

Not to be missed.

For more info, go to their website.