A Play of Manors: “Arcadia” at the Rep

October 17, 2014 4:26 am Leave a Comment

As with most writers, Tom Stoppard sets out to prove that man does not live on bread alone. We need a little more, a little metaphysics, or it’s back to cattle grazing. “Arcadia” is a testament to that claim, and you’ll struggle to find a finer production of it than at the Yale Repertory Theater.

I was baffled, seduced and enchanted enough to go twice, once on a Friday, and the result was ultimately disheartening: After the show, I knew the rest of the weekend, whatever lay in store, would be a dull, meaningless and post-coital affair.

“Arcadia,” as with many of Stoppard’s works, is about subjunctive history: the what-ifs and the might-have-beens. The play flicks between two time periods in the Coverley family’s countryside manor: 1809 and the present day. The current residents delve into the ambiguities of the manor’s predecessors, who themselves appear, whilst they muse on mathematics, literature and entropy.

Septimus (played by Thomas Pecinka DRA ‘15) shows spectacular disdain for his rival, Chater, and his capacity for condescension is astounding. The spit can be seen flying out of his mouth as he flawlessly enunciates every word with a mammoth breadth of intonation and intensity. Not only Septimus but the whole cast moves with exceptional style as they posture, sit and emote. In the 1809 setting, the stage resembles the many Gainsborough family portraits at the YCBA. However, director James Bundy doesn’t limit himself to the classical canon. As the scenes change, gentle minimalistic interludes coo to the audience, ambient musical numbers that could’ve come straight from Arcade Fire’s soundtrack to “Her.”

Max Gordon Moore DRA ‘11 turns Valentine, the sardonic and impatient mathematician, into the most lovable arsehole possible. The callousness of his lines is given an unprecedented warmth in their delivery — “of course she bloody couldn’t” is no longer rude, but somehow charming. He states (to an attentive Hannah) the beauty and wonder of both chaos theory and fractal geometry as the most miraculous phenomenon: “It’s how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy.”

Bundy opts to fill this speech with intermittent and unsuccessful attempts on Valentine’s part to kiss Hannah. The pathos and intensity of the speech are somewhat compromised, but the audience howls with laughter. Bundy is ruthlessly attentive throughout: When two characters from the different eras are reading onstage together, the books’ pages are turned in unison. Little details are spiced up: In the text, there is “Give Lightning [the tortoise] a kick on your way out.” In the play, “lightning” is replaced with “Gus,” the recalcitrant boy. Cruder joke, bigger laugh. Bernard (Stephen Barker Turner) fistbumps Chloe. The play is a little racier, and for something three hours long, these attention-seizing gestures are valuable.

The production’s energy doesn’t just come from gimmicks, but also from passion of character. When Bernard delivers a panegyric to literature and the individual talent, prompted by Valentine’s claim that “personalities” are “trivial,” “Arcadia” stops simmering and it starts to burn. Behind Turner’s razor-sharp articulation, one can feel the voice of a writer telling all the moderns who worship data and information to just fuck off: “A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it.”

Hannah (René Augesen), the world-weary writer who is profoundly unable to love anyone, closes the math-versus-literature debate with exquisite mediation: “It’s all trivial — your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”

This is Stoppard’s catechism. It’s the curiosity and the meaning we find, that is nourishing, not the object or art form to which it corresponds. Augusen, who plays Hannah, utters this speech with complete and perfect sincerity. There’s no one who won’t buy it.

“Arcadia” has the odd hitch. Some of the British accents aren’t quite there, but perhaps I’m only saying this as a Brit myself: to American ears unaccustomed to our eccentric breed of sharpened consonants and flattered vowels, they’ll go undetected. Every innovation of Bundy’s pays off, and we’re left with an original production of “Arcadia,” a rare feat indeed.

When Stoppard came to speak here last month and was asked what he looked for in performances of his plays, the reply was simply “clarity of speech.” Stoppard would be delighted with what the Yale Rep has done with “Arcadia”: Despite the breathtaking speed at which the one-liners and aphorisms come, nothing is missed or blunted. The old world moves fluidly into the new and back again; Pecinka is debonaire, winning Septimus is counterbalanced by the wild pairing of Turner and Moore. As the characters from both eras dance together, oblivious of each other, in the play’s impossibly magnificent finale, a pseudo-Santana guitar riff from a garden party slips into a Chopin waltz from the dining room. The lights fade to an indigo glimmer, and every working mechanism in the play is visually resolved: New and old are one, disorder and order are one — there is harmony.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Thanks to ‘Inspector Hound’

March 1, 2013 3:31 am Leave a Comment

Directed by Alexi Sargeant ’15 and playing in the Calhoun Cabaret this weekend, “The Real Inspector Hound” presents a formally daring challenge. The script, written by Tom Stoppard (who earned fame for his witty rewrite of “Hamlet” in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”), stuffs both a play within a play — the story of a murder in Muldoon Manor — and commentary on that play by a pair of critics into a single act. Initially, the critics merely remark on the action, but, as the plot zips forward, their reality blurs into that of the characters onstage. I won’t tell you how or why, but, by the end of the play, everyone becomes involved in both plots.

In an early scene, Mrs. Drudge, Caitlin Miller ’16, listens to a police report on the sighting of a madman in the nearby moors and then comments on how isolated Muldoon Manor is. The joke relies on your knowledge that nearly every British murder mystery takes place in a manor house cut off from the world. In fact, “Hound” works through the genre’s standard tropes one by one — from a confrontation over tea to a game of bridge played with an increasingly ridiculous and inscrutable set of rules (so pretty much any game of bridge). At times this lampooning becomes extreme, when the characters make several references in a row to “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” for instance. The humor lands if you know what it’s sending up, but those who think of Sherlock Holmes as just another Robert Downey Jr. action hero will find little to latch onto. And while lovers of Victorian mysteries might laugh, they, most likely, will not.

Of course, the two critics at the back of the stage tell the audience this opinion during the play, among their other quips. Birdfoot, Alexander Oki ’13, takes an old-fashioned perspective to his job. He is carrying on an affair with one actress, and, halfway through the play, he falls in love with the other. Moon, Connor Lounsbury ’14, on the other hand, is more serious. The second-string reviewer for his local paper, he dreams of one day taking the lead — at one point, he even considers murder in a speech that Lounsbury delivers with maniacal glee. But the script also places the critics in the position of audience stand-ins. Once during the performance, they both looked into their programs for an actor’s name, and I realized that I was doing the same thing. Later, when the plot puts the critics in mortal danger, I began to feel highly uncomfortable, as I had spent so much time following their read on the plot. Critics and audience members, as Stoppard points out, really don’t think for themselves.

“Inspector Hound” ends with a big reveal, and, without spoiling anything, it works. That is not to say that the play has an emotional core — the actors play each character as a caricature, complete with a varying array of near-British accents — but that the conceit makes sense. By the time the curtain falls, a murder has been solved. The most satisfying part of any whodunit is the intellectual challenge, the way it keeps you on your feet until the end of the play. And, like every part of a good mystery, Stoppard’s extra layer of commentary provides yet another satisfying way of pointing in the wrong direction.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Thanks to “Inspector Hound”

1:53 am Leave a Comment

At one point in “The Real Inspector Hound,” the play’s five central characters realize that there may be a murderer in their midst and they all rush to grab improvised weapons — the maid gets a rope, the ex-soldier in a wheelchair clutches a bent pipe and a young socialite fiercely wields a candlestick. This far into the play, audience members who know the board game “Clue” have felt this reference coming from a long way away (with the characters in color-coded outfits, it’s a surprise that the girl in red isn’t actually named “Miss Scarlett”). But this is part of the point. “Hound” purposefully revels in recycled dialogue, and send-ups of character types any reader of Agatha Christie already knows far too well, because it also features two critics who sit behind the stage. “Derivative,” says one. “I know who did it!” shouts the other.
Directed by Alexi Sargeant ’15 and playing in the Calhoun Cabaret this weekend, “The Real Inspector Hound” presents a formally daring challenge. The script, written by Tom Stoppard (who earned fame for his witty rewrite of “Hamlet” in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”), stuffs both a play within a play — the story of a murder in Muldoon Manor — and commentary on that play by a pair of critics into a single act. Initially, the critics merely remark on the action, but, as the plot zips forward, their reality blurs into that of the characters onstage. I won’t tell you how or why, but, by the end of the play, everyone becomes involved in both plots.
In an early scene, Mrs. Drudge, Caitlin Miller ’16, listens to a police report on the sighting of a madman in the nearby moors and then comments on how isolated Muldoon Manor is. The joke relies on your knowledge that nearly every British murder mystery takes place in a manor house cut off from the world. In fact, “Hound” works through the genre’s standard tropes one by one — from a confrontation over tea, to a game of bridge played with an increasingly ridiculous and inscrutable set of rules (so pretty much any game of bridge). At times this lampooning becomes extreme, when the characters make several references in a row to “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” for instance. The humor lands if you know what it’s sending up, but those who think of Sherlock Holmes as just another Robert Downey Jr. action hero will find little to latch onto. And while lovers of Victorian mysteries might laugh, they, most likely, will not.
Of course, the two critics at the back of the stage tell the audience this opinion during the play, among their other quips. Birdfoot, Alexander Oki ’13, takes an old-fashioned perspective to his job. He is carrying on an affair with one actress, and, halfway through the play, he falls in love with the other. Moon, Connor Lounsbury ’14, on the other hand, is more serious. The second-string reviewer for his local paper, he dreams of one day taking the lead — at one point, he even considers murder in a speech that Lounsbury delivers with maniacal glee. But the script also places the critics in the position of audience stand-ins. Once during the performance, they both looked into their programs for an actor’s name, and I realized that I was doing the same thing. Later, when the plot puts the critics in mortal danger, I began to feel very uncomfortable as I had spent so much time following their read on the plot. Critics and audience members, as Stoppard points out, really don’t think for themselves.
“Inspector Hound” ends with a big reveal, and, without spoiling anything, it works. That is not to say that the play has an emotional core — the actors play each character as a caricature, complete with a varying array of near-British accents — but that the conceit makes sense. By the time the curtain falls, a murder has been solved. The most satisfying part of any whodunit is the intellectual challenge, the way it keeps you on your feet until the end of the play. And, like every part of a good mystery, Stoppard’s extra layer of commentary provides yet another satisfying way of pointing in the wrong direction.

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