Glittering Doubles

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: ARCADIA

AUTHOR: TOM STOPPARD

WHERE: NATIONAL THEATRE, LONDON

THE BOTTOM LINE: Cerebral pleasures yield to emotional pain in a wry blend of Byron, biographers, physics and gardens.

It's nearly a decade since a new Tom Stoppard play has been seen on Broadway, not because he hasn't been working or has lost his arch wit and narrative originality, but because commercial producers fear that his learned , tragicomedies demand too much of audiences intellectually and indulge them too little emotionally. Stoppard's Hapgood mingled a spy story, a love story, games of mistaken identity and reflections on physics, and has never had a major U.S. production. The same fate may well await his new play, although it is by far the best from any British writer in years.

This time Stoppard climaxes a splendid intellectual farrago with a poignant image of two couples dancing, literally and metaphysically, in the dark. One embraces in the dawn of the romantic 19th century, the other at the twilight of the nihilistic 20th. Both are confronting the little tragedy of death and the grand tragedy of entropy, the inevitable darkening and chilling of the universe. This dual moment, and the glittering double story that precedes it, are full of more affection and compassion than Stoppard has ever shown before.

The story of Arcadia is, like most Stoppard plots, hard to summarize in much less than the three hours it takes on the stage. The action in both centuries unfolds in a stately home, a symbol at once of Britain's continuity and of its decay. The 19th century story focuses on a startlingly gifted 13-year-old girl and her tutor, a seemingly shallow, smug university man a decade older. The 20th century story focuses on the present generation of the girl's landed family and on two biographers who are probing Byron's connections to the house, investigating the story of a mysterious hermit and researching the evolution of the English garden.

On one level the story parallels the actual events of bygone times with the mostly erroneous "discoveries" and deductions made about them in the present. At a deeper level the piece is a meditation on the chanciness of fame and the meaning of genius, strongly suggesting that the 19th century girl was a considerably greater figure than her celebrated house guest, Lord Byron. At its most profound, Stoppard's elegant dialogue addresses the competing principles of order and disorder in the universe.

Trevor Nunn, one of the world's foremost directors, enables the two centuries to live comfortably within the same space, beguilingly designed by Mark Thompson. Nunn evokes exquisite performances, notably from Felicity Kendal as one of the 20th century scholars, and from Emma Fielding and Rufus Sewell as the brilliant girl and her initially charmed, ultimately doomed tutor. As usual in a Stoppard play, the true star is Stoppard, and he has never burned brighter or more kindly.