Is Tom too Stoppard by half?
A rather pleasing thought occurred to me half way through David Leveaux’s superb revival of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant Arcadia last night at the Duke of York’s: was I having to concentrate as hard on the play as the author himself?
For I remember reading somewhere that once the playwright had completed each work, so he returned all his research books to the London Library, wiped the slate clean and started all over again; in other words, he’s no more au courant with the themes and scary subject matter of Arcadia now than he was before he started out on the piece in the early 1990s.
It’s a curious thing. The play is intensely enjoyable on a line by line basis but very hard to talk about when you take one step away. In the interval, the first night crowd simply spilled on to St Martin’s Lane purring with pleasure.
Stoppard himself was smoking away in the stage door alley asking the group of friends around him, I like to think, what the hell was going on. Janet Suzman said she was dumbstruck all over again by the play, by its sheer beauty, while her great friend and fellow actor Charles Kay fixed me with an odd look and asked if I had to go to the theatre every single night.
I think what Charles was really saying was, how could one possibly cope with such an avalanche of witty intelligence in the theatre on a nightly basis.
The answer to that’s fairly simple: one doesn’t, because a night like Arcadia happens once in a blue moon. I hadn’t seen the play since the opening night at the National fifteen years ago. Trevor Nunn’s production was brilliant. David Leveaux’s revival is not far short of matching it, and the acting of Nancy Carroll, Neil Pearson and Dan Stevens, especially, is as good as it gets.
I have only one note for Nancy, who can do no wrong, and is just gorgeous as Lady Croom, despite a first costume that doesn’t nearly do her justice. She swallows one of my favourite lines by rattling it out as she turns upstage: “Do not dabble in paradox, Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit.”
And that’s the sum total of my complaints. The more I think about Jude Law’s Hamlet the night before, the less I think well of it.
One of Michael Grandage’s great virtues as a director is his speediness. He brings home Hamlet, if not the bacon, in just over three hours, but it’s too fast and there are far too many unkind cuts.
But back to Charles Kay’s question. Who can really complain about going out to the theatre every night when you consider just for a minute what treats are in store, and what revels we have endured just this week alone, starting with Much Ado in the Park.
There was Sister Act, Jude’s Hamlet, Arcadia….and next week not even the most jaundiced theatregoer would gladly miss the Sam Mendes double-bill at the Old Vic or Helen Mirren’s Phedre at the National.
It’s the actors I feel sorry for. Well, a little bit, anyway. It’s damned hard work giving eight performances a week in this weather, which has veered betweeen hot and clammy all week. I worry for Jude Law’s voice which is not in tip top condition to start with.
And I bumped into Simon Callow at lunchtime yesterday, who told me that Waiting for Godot is really hard work, totally exhausting. And he only has to come on twice in the play, admittedly fit to bust and straining at Lucky’s leash.
Audiences, and critics, don’t have to work nearly as hard by comparison. Except, of course, when they sit through a demanding masterpiece by Tom Stoppard.