A HOUSE OF GAMES

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

Were it not so faithful to its own artistic designs, you might suppose Tom Stoppard had written Arcadia expressly to refute his critics. Though having led something of a charmed professional life (he has been internationally acclaimed since his first produced play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in 1967), the Czechoslovak-born playwright has not been spared his detractors, particularly in his adopted England.

We've been told Stoppard has no real subject but his own ingenuity. But with Arcadia he has taken on, dazzlingly, an expansive slew of topics: a young girl's dawning sexuality, the birth of Romanticism, modern academia, post-Newtonian physics. We've heard he fails to understand women or to create good female characters. But in Thomasina Coverly, a 13-year-old mathematical genius fated to die before her 17th birthday, he has forged a female role any young actress would pine for. We've heard that he is all brain and no heart, and yet by Arcadia's final act, Stoppard has shown he knows enough about hearts to break them.

As often happens with his plays, Arcadia--which opened on Broadway last week--is more complicated in the summarizing than in the performing; the staging clarifies a great deal. The action unfolds in a grand English country house. The scenes alternate between a few hectic days in April 1809 when a number of guests, including--perhaps--Lord Byron, have come for a visit, and the present day when the house is invaded by, among others, a pair of literary historians who turn out to be Byron scholars (Blair Brown, Victor Garber).

The play is a sort of bifurcated detective story. We observe a variety of events, most of them comical, unfolding in 1809, and we see also how the haphazard by-products of those events--stray letters, drawings, jottings--are interpreted, shrewdly but often incorrectly, nearly two centuries later. The past proves inhospitable; it resists the probings of the present.

But if Arcadia provides a cautionary fable for the historian, it is also a sort of trans-century canticle whose themes resound through the decades in transmuted, enriched forms. Stoppard has devised the perfect setting for his verbal ambiguity and punning, as when he plays on the phrase "the action of bodies in heat." To Thomasina and her tutor Septimus Hodge, the words suggest the entropic universe of the second law of thermodynamics and the collapse of classical mathematics. But to Chloe Coverly, a distant descendant of Thomasina, those bodies are human and the heat is sexual. Words, no less than the house's visitors, are constantly on the move.

Arcadia, first staged two years ago in London, has survived the passage to Broadway intact, although the acting was generally superior in the original production. While perfectly sufficient, the present Thomasina (Jennifer Dundas) doesn't bring to this brutally taxing role of doomed prodigy quite the dancing-flame intensity that Emma Fielding did. And the new Septimus (Billy Crudup) has the aplomb but not the haunted intellectual uneasiness Rufus Sewell conveyed. A pleasing surprise, however, is Robert Sean Leonard, playing Valentine Coverly, a modern-day biologist and computer scientist. As Claudio in Kenneth Branagh's film Much Ado About Nothing, Leonard looked thoroughly out of his element while trying to do what stage actors traditionally do--proclaim words of love in ornamental verse. Here, in an odder role that requires him to speak of mathematics in hard-edged, gemlike prose, he is gratifyingly convincing.

Yet the pluses and minuses of the Broadway production (directed, as in London, by Trevor Nunn) should not obscure the fact that in Arcadia we have been given a major English drama, one of those by which, ultimately, the theater of our time may be evaluated. It is a play that holds up beautifully not only on the stage but on the page. When Thomasina, hungry for a new mathematics, exclaims, "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell," we might have stepped into an Auden poem. When a formidable lady silences her brother by snapping, "Do not dabble in paradox, Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit," we can hear Wilde whispering, "I wish I'd said that." And for concentrated lyricism, the scene in which Thomasina bewails the burning of the classical library of Alexandria--a doomed girl genius lamenting the conflagration of ancient genius--is absolutely stunning.

Arcadia offers the heartening spectacle of a dramatist who, with commendable industry, has found the unusual but handsome vessel into which most of his obsessions neatly fit. And Stoppard makes it look easy. With Arcadia, he has fabricated a work as simple as a perfect cube and as complex as the physics of a breaking wave. Or make that the physics of the turbulent air in a room where many people are clapping.