If you have to take a quick crash course in thermodynamics and chaos theory before seeing a play, is it really worth seeing? It's a question that could be posed by Arcadia, Tom Stoppard's bulgingly brainy theatre piece that Black Swan State Theatre Company has chosen for its second 2012 season offering.
- Venue: State Theatre Centre
- Director: Tom Stoppard
It's a big cast, with gorgeous costumes and an elegant set. It's also brim-full of ideas, like the physics underlying why you can't unscramble the jam in porridge once it's stirred in. Or the story behind Fermat's last theorem, or why Newtonian physics is wrong.
By interval, you may find yourself desperately reaching for the program and thumbing a page marked 'The Chaos Theory Explained'. It says that chaos theory is "a field of study in mathematics that focuses on the behaviour of complex systems."
No offence, but that hardly helps me understand Stoppard's play. Slightly more helpful is the hint that "small changes to initial conditions can produce vastly different outcomes."
Ahah! So is that why Stoppard has shaped his play around the passions and secret handwritten notes of a 19th century group of characters, turning them into those 'small changes' that, 180 years later, bizarrely influence the outcome of unrelated peoples' lives?
It may be that you simply need to grasp that all physical sciences - and by extension, our own lives - involve aspects that are predetermined and others that are utterly random. Those two contradictory forces are constantly at play in the universe, as interconnected as the symbols for Ying and Yang.
Make no mistake, the play Arcadia is funny in ways that require no PhD in quantum physics. The inhabitants of English country manor Sidley Park are an amusing lot, including manor matron Lady Croom, played with haughty authority by Rebecca Davis. There's Ezra Chater, a failed poet whose foppishness actor Brendan Hanson has lots of fun with; as Jellaby, veteran actor Edgar Metcalfe brings gravitas to the role of long-suffering manservant.
An endearing pair are Thomasina, the daughter, and her tutor Septimus Hodge (with excellent performances by Whitney Richards and Scott Sheridan). She yearns to learn everything, from the thermodynamics of heat transference - all hot objects go cold, never the opposite - to why her tutor's carnal embrace of the poet's wife in the gazebo caused such scandal.
Nearly two hundred years on, another couple are trying to decipher the clues to that liaison and its attendant consequences. Hannah Jarvis is a garden historian who clashes with pompous academic Bernard Nightingale when both converge on Sidley House for their research. Actors Kirsty Hillhouse and Andrew McFarlane have huge fun in both roles; McFarlane's impressive performance invokes the awkward posturing and spluttering speech of many a sociophobic don.
Alicia Clements' elegant library room is a perfect reflection of orderly Newtonian thinking. It is an apt setting for a play that, through its time-travelling scenes, will demonstrate how that classical order was upended by Romanticism and advances in scientific thinking, robbing us forever of the comfort of certainty.
You get the impression that playwright Stoppard loves uncertainty, mischief and meddling; he adores the human impulse to poke our noses into forbidden places, ask heretical questions and upset the status quo.
Black Swan's production is a fine exposition of all the ideas that Stoppard loves and the needle-sharp wit with which he makes his points.
By Tom Stoppard
Black Swan State Theatre Company
State Theatre Centre, 7.30pm
Until April 1