Drama in Arcadia: Mind the gap

“What is carnal embrace?” asks one precocious young woman. “It is throwing one’s arms around a side of beef,” answers her perverse tutor. As the evening progresses, we are treated to many other such mental canapés. That a gazebo where one has sexual congress is not a meat larder. That many men desire to know women in more than the biblical sense. That some women have a firmer and fairer grasp of history and happenings around than most of their male contemporaries. That a few rare children can stumble upon the disturbing truths about the heat death of the universe given time and space enough to unbend their rigid paternalistic training.

Is your mind spinning, after only a few minutes in Arcadia? Well, welcome to the weird and wacky world of Sir Tom Stoppard (responsible, among other oeuvres, for his screenplay of the 1998 Oscar-winning ‘Shakespeare in Love’). It was some enchanted evening. Where heady knowledge of all kinds – carnal, scientific, historical – embraced in a smorgasbord of ideas about sex, life, death, and everything in-between. And, in the hands of committed aficionados of theatre Mind Adventures, it was a treat for those who braved the torrid downpour outside and humid updrafts inside the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery’s bespoke auditorium. It offered two hours’ worth of hors d’oeuvres for thought which I’m still digesting.

The play’s NOT the thing when it’s *ONLY* a dramatized reading. Maybe less is more when words – and the ideas they communicate – take precedence over delivery and characterisation. Dare we suggest that no one serious enough about theatre missed sophisticated sets or fancy lights? (Stoppard’s vintage is arguably best uncorked under relentless stark lighting, anyway.) Dress: secondary, supplementary. Movement: minimal, manageable. Interlocution: integral, indispensable. Avant-garde; but not so arcane as to be inaccessible to the average brain belonging to a bum at the edge of their seat…

There was some element of hiatus between Stoppard’s conception and Holsinger’s birthing. That it was minor is to Mind Adventures’ credit. Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. Gender reassignment (one male character in Tracy’s thought process was rendered female, one female male) was the least egregious of surgeries to effect on what critics have recognised as a masterpiece of mindful theatre. It gave a science-saturated and history-heavy script that extra ounce of outré excitement. 

As far as proving one character’s hypothesis goes – that sex makes chaos (in the math theory sense) of a deterministic cosmos – it gave indulgent voyeurs of this cerebral embrace of life and death more bang for their buck… order and disorder, life and death, romanticism and classicism, history and historicity and historiography intertwined like, well, Poussin’s shepherds in a sexier alternative to his 1637 pastoral canvas of Arcadia, q.v. As you see, something for everyone – from landscape architects to amorous layabouts. Only Lord Byron (heard off, never seen) and Death as a character were MIA. And Stoppard managed to smuggle that latter spectre in too.

{If you’re pedantic or simply a purist, Arcadia the reading could well have disappointed in some slight respects. Sorry, dears. If you’re open to the interplay of ideas as they gain form and flesh – and frailty – from social and conceptual intercourse, the metaphorical earth may have moved beneath your trembling mental limbs. Sorry, dears, it’s this Stoppard man’s orgasmic ideas.}

So, I’d highly recommend you read the play. Of course, some of the science is passé. For one thing, Fermat’s Last Theorem – which forms such a titillating titbit in Arcadia – was proven only months after the play was first produced in the UK. Then again, apologists would contend that it only underlines Stoppard’s arguments about what actually happened in the past… why, where, when… and how history is interpreted variously – hopelessly and/or hilariously – depending on the quantum of information provided, and the mental and emotional mechanisms available to meaty computers or human brains, to make sense of matters known or surmised on. (If you think that’s a mouthful, try giving ear to some of the main characters’ ^attention speeches^!)

Speaking of which, Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke was as mesmeric as a masterfully restrained metronome, patiently tap-dancing a sympathetically sashaying audience through from carnal embrace to the heat death of his protégé. Tehani Chitty as the above character’s persistent investigator in a later, different, often confluent time frame (there’s Stoppard again, with his pesky ideas about space and history) was a revelation to me: on, generously sharing the spotlight, conscious that micro movements as much as paying attention to other players gives one’s performance the requisite spit or polish. 

Gehan Gunatilleke as a narcissistic critic played opposite her providing a suitably debonair counterfoil to her more demure historian he’s pursuing who’s pursuing in turn the same truth as he. Dylan Perera in minor role as action-interrupting butler Jellaby was characteristically in underplaying mode… I could analyse the contribution of other portrayals, but I’d find it as painful as you might find it pointless? Suffice it to say that with such a stellar cast as this, Tracy would be out of her mind not to adventure into a Full Monty, the bells and whistles production that would stamp Colombo with a vintage Stoppard for its own nascent maturity as mindful thespians.

‘Et in Arcadia ego.’ (And in Arcady I. Or: as Death would have it: “Once upon a time, I too was in Arcadia.”)