Lost Arcadia

I was walking by the Royal Alexandria Theatre Monday and saw that Arcadia had closed over the weekend.  That really bummed me out, as I thought it was open for another week.  Later, looking through an email to a friend, I see that it was always supposed to close that weekend, though it is possible that they skipped the Sunday matinee performance.  Maybe that is just as well, since I would have been doubly-bummed out to realize that I could have gotten fairly cheap tickets* for Sunday's performance after oversleeping and not making it to Buffalo.  (The weather looks like it will hold, so I do plan on making it this weekend, trying to leave some flexibility in case I need to visit an open house up around the Donlands subway station.) 

It would have been particularly fun to go again with my friend and her husband, though mostly I feel bad for her for not finding the time to go.  I saw it a bit earlier in the run, and it was a very nice production.  I figure it will turn up in the next 5 or 6 years in one of the cities I am apt to visit, so will try to catch it then.

I'll go ahead and post a few of the notes I was going to send her way to help catch some of the nuances of the play that are hard to pick up on one's first viewing.  I think they are relatively spoiler-free, but don't read on if one doesn't like any information about a play's plot before viewing it.  I am, however, going to assume some basic familiarity with the play and its characters, though one can go look them up here if one has no idea what the play is about.

There is quite a bit in the play about landscape aesthetics.  The garden prior to 1809 was based upon the Italian (and French) ideal of tamed wilderness, whereas the garden is being reconstructed to look more "natural," overgrown and wild.  This is basically the taste shifting away from the picturesque (or at least the Italianate picturesque) to something more rustic.  However, it is someone curious that it is the (unseen) Lord Croom who completely overrules Lady Croom and puts Noakes in charge of reconfiguring the garden.  (One would have thought that the gardens were the lady's responsibility, but perhaps Lord Croom has too much time on his hands, and thus took an interest.)  Lady Croom is most put out by the upcoming changes and wants to keep her gardens tidy.  She is particularly put out by the noise of the steam pump, which must be involved in powering shovels or rollers to transform her garden.  I'll come back to this engine in a bit, as it becomes fairly important to Thomasina's theories.

In the present day, Hannah finds it terribly disturbing that during the early 1800s England essentially turned its back on the Enlightenment and went all "Romantic" and gooey.  Bernard picks up on this just a bit, but is far more interested in uncovering the Byron connection to really pursue it.  I think an interesting tangent would be how there is almost no "Nature" left.  Even the most pristine-looking forests in the U.S. and certainly all of Europe has been impacted by human interventions at one time or another.  There probably are some stretches of northern Canada that are close to pristine, but that would be about it.  While he focuses on a much broader canvas than an estate garden, William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis has some very good sections on how humans transform the landscape and then, a generation or two later, this becomes the accepted landscape -- the way it has always been.

Most of the higher order maths that Thomasina and Septimus discuss (and then Valentine expounds on) are a bit too esoteric to get into here, though I do like Thomasina's comment that Fermat was just having a jape when he wrote down that he didn't have enough space in the margin to prove his theorem.  Fermat's Last Theorem is now considered proven (and perhaps ironically only a couple of years after Arcadia was published), but it was a pretty ungainly thing and it is done in a very elaborate way that surely is not what Fermat had on his mind.  I suspect his proof, if he indeed had any, was largely based on intuition and only covered n=3 through 10 or something like that.

That is somewhat akin to the flashes of insight that Thomasina has that sort of predate the more formal investigations of chaos theory and indeed astronomy or perhaps cosmology.  Thomasina and Septimus are discussing algebra and classical physics, where certain terms can be passed back and forth across the equals sign or various actions can be undone, transferring kinetic energy to potential energy and back.  First, Thomasina wonders why if one swirls jam into rice pudding, one cannot reverse the process and separate the two.  Septimus doesn't think that much of this discovery, though actually it is an important characteristic of chaotic systems, and I believe this is still considered beyond the reach of conventional mathematics.

What is quite interesting, however, is how his metaphors come back to haunt him, even if he doesn't realize it at the time.
Thomasina: ... You cannot stir things apart.
Septimus: No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it forever. This is known as free will or self-determination.

Then a bit later in the play, Thomasina mentions that she noticed Noakes's engine will always lose a penny's worth of heat energy in the exchange (from one form of energy to another).  This is a somewhat odd thing, as she would have not really had the tools or the maths to directly measure power output.  It's sort of a sly nod to Fermat's margin, I suspect.  However, as the two discuss this, it sort of dawns on Septimus that this implies the heat death of the universe.  Somehow Thomasina has uncovered the fundamental ideas behind the Second Law of Thermodynamics (and to get to the original finding, presumably the First Law as well) only 20 years before they were really advanced at all and 50 years before they were codified and generally accepted by physicists.  Now, it turns out that most of the discussion of the Second Law comes from Valentine explaining this to Hannah (and to the audience).

Obviously, it is a huge stretch to imagine a fairly sheltered girl of nearly 17 to have these flashes of insight, but the discussion around the ideas is quite interesting, as Septimus struggles to understand and reconcile himself to the implications: "So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold.  Dear me.", whereas Valentine pretty blithely accepts that all energy will ultimately dissipate throughout the universe and it will all become an endless, unlit cloud of dust ("everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly").  Perhaps because he is a rational scientist, who was largely schooled in maths and physics.

Gentlemen of Septimus's era really were versed in literature and the classics and natural science and history and even theology in a way that has largely fallen out of fashion today.   Even if Stoppard makes Thomasina just a bit too brilliant and perhaps Septimus a bit too fragile (knowing what happens to him after 1809), this is an exhilarating play about ideas and their consequences, which is just not seen enough upon the boards.  Actually, let me refine that.  There are quite a few good plays about political ideologies and their consequences (and The Coast of Utopia, which I will be reviewing soon, is a particularly good example), but there are few good plays about scientific ideas.  Generally, even plays about scientists are more about personalities than science per se.  I am not entirely sure about Frayn's Copenhagen and where it falls.  I think he does take the science seriously, but it is more about working through the moral implications of scientific research and less about how exciting it is to be working to split the atom and uncover the building blocks of the universe.  At any rate, Arcadia and Copenhagen pretty much stand alone, though I am probably missing a few other contenders.

Just as an aside, I don't count Proof, since it talks in such general terms about the amazing math done by the main character, but it doesn't provide any meaningful details (it's all about primes, and that's about all the audience gets).  It's sort of a cheat in that way.  Now, Proof has some other merits, particularly looking at how being driven to intellectual heights can lead to serious mental instability. For instance, people being driven slightly mad when, like Mr. Ramsay from To the Lighthouse, they sense Z is out there but they can only reach J or K on a good day and don't accept their limitations (as Ramsay ultimately does).  I liked Proof, but it is not in the same league as Arcadia, which is perhaps my favourite play written in the last 50 years.  I can hardly wait to see it again.

*I know ticket sales for Arcadia were a bit weak, but I hope Mirvish did well enough that they consider transferring some of the other great shows from Shaw and possibly Stratford.  I heard very good things about J.B. Priestley's When We Are Married, and I'd see that if it transfers.  But in general, the best plan is to try to see the shows over the summer or very early fall if there is anything that catches one's eye, since there are certainly no guarantees that anything will be remounted.

I'm going to hold off on Shaw, since it looks like I'll just zip in and out for two Saturday matinees, but I will probably end up booking something at Stratford, though I'll want to see what their exchange policy is if I end up with a family emergency and can't make it one weekend.