Arcadia at Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Jun 20 2008 by Alison Anderson

WHEN audience members fail to return post-interval, nod off and/ or watch check, a theatre has hatched a turkey.

Thus it is with Arcadia: an over-long, verbose trawl through lives in an English stately home, maths, physics and literature in the early 1800s and modern time.

Tom Stoppard penned this in the early 1990s, yet the Theatre in Scotland has left it to Pitlochry to inflict this upon Scottish audiences for the first time during its 2008 Summer Season.

While Arcadia failed to engage with a large proportion of the PFT audience, it did come north on the back critical acclaim, awards and suggestions that it is Stoppard’s finest plays.

Switching back and forth between the 19th century and the present, Arcadia addresses questions of art, science, and history – and how they intersect. The story has the potential to be poignant and entertaining, but wallows in over-complicated dialogue on the aforementioned subjects, and over-acting which makes irritating characters downright annoying.

Under Richard Baron’s direction, there are some elements worthy of praise: the fluidity of the production, the fine performances by some cast members, particularly Grant O’Rourke as the tutor Septimus Hodge, and the peppering of witticisms.

The play is set in its entirety in a single room of the stately home of Sidley Park. Scenes alternate between the 20th century and the 19th as the present day incumbents and their dislikeable academic visitor attempt to piece together the lives and events on the estate in the early 1800s. These two periods finally converge at the end in a lovely and poignant scene – a dance to the music of time itself.

Arcadia plays in repertoire until October 20.