I haven’t seen any of Tom Stoppard’s plays in live performance. I watched Professional Foul on television when it was first broadcast in 1977, but it’s rather different from his work for theatre. It’s about a philosophy professor attending an academic conference in Prague. He’s using the unexciting conference as cover to go to a World Cup qualifying match which is being played at the same time. At first, he refuses to smuggle a thesis (which argues for the primacy of individual rights) out of the country because he thinks that this would be unethical, an abuse of the Czech government’s hospitality, which he has accepted by agreeing to participate in the conference. When the thesis’s author, a former student of his, is arrested on fabricated charges of illegal currency dealing, the professor is persuaded to change his mind, and resorts to playing a dangerous trick on one of his colleagues in order to get the thesis out. I approached the play warily: I understood that Stoppard had a reputation as something of a conservative thinker at the time — he was certainly an anticommunist, which I would then have seen as adequate grounds for suspicion.
What I remember most about this play, which (as I’ve just recently learned) is now available in its entirety on YouTube, are some of the jokes, though its theme is deadly serious. For example, while they’re listening to a tedious paper about linguistic ambiguity, another academic asks the protagonist if he ever wonders if all this is worth it. The professor answers with a decisive “No”, indicating that it never crosses his mind that it might be worthwhile, quite a different point of view from the one that prompted the question. The scene in which newspaper journalists dictate their reports of the match over the phone from their hotel rooms is highly amusing.
Years later, around 1990, I went through a phase of reading several of Stoppard’s plays and Michael Billington’s book on the playwright. I was going to the theatre relatively often for me, to see plays by David Hare, Tom Murphy, Edward Bond, Pinter, Shakespeare, Webster, Etherege, Wycherley and various others, but still didn’t see any Stoppard. I read The Real Thing about a decade after its first performance in 1982 and remember thinking “I wish I knew how to do that.”
By the time of Stoppard’s death last year, it had been more than 30 years since I’d read any of his plays, and I didn’t have copies of any of them. Arcadia, first performed and published in 1993, which must be the last one I had read, is the subject of this post. It’s partly a play of ideas, a dazzling confection of theories about landscape design, mathematics, entropy, literary and historical scholarship, but it is not just, or indeed primarily, a play of ideas. There’s quite a lot about sex, which 18-year-old Chloë sees as the factor which introduces a fundamental unpredictability into our otherwise orderly universe:
The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said. I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan. (sc. 7, p. 73)
Chloë asks her mathematician brother, Valentine, if she is the first person to have thought of this idea and he replies that he thinks she is. In this, Chloë is echoing another daughter of the Coverly family, almost 180 years earlier. In the play’s first scene, Thomasina, then 13, asks her tutor, Septimus Hodge, if she is the first person to have thought of the proposition that, if the universe is deterministic (as Chloë will come close to admitting) then even though nobody is clever enough, or good enough at algebra to arrive at “the formula for all the future” (sc. 1, p. 5), that formula must already exist. It is real and accurately describes everything that will happen, even though nobody can know what it it. Septimus confirms that, as far as he knows, Thomasina is indeed the first person to have thought of this.
To a convinced determinist, Thomasina’s argument will be more convincing than Chloë’s. Unpredictability is already a feature of the universal system: there’s no need for sex to be an “attraction that Newton left out” (as Valentine describes it, sc. 7, p. 74) in order to account for the future’s propensity to evade our foresight. Anyway, sexual attraction is already an integral part of the deterministic system, not an independently complicating factor that determinists had ignored. So, for that convinced determinist, Chloë’s late 20th century conception represents a falling off from Thomasina’s early 19th century one. This is consistent with the argument I want to put forward, that the play’s major theme is entropy: that disorder must increase with the passage of time.
In the characters’ discourse Newton represents two distinct ideas. First is determinism (about which I wrote a year ago in my discussion of Brian Klaas’s book, Fluke) which implies Thomasina’s idea that the formula that determines all future events already exists. The other thing “Newton” represents is a conception of reality that doesn’t include the second law of thermodynamics, the discovery of which his theories predate. In layperson’s terms that law says that energy will always irreversibly move from a more highly ordered state to a less ordered one. The law is easier to illustrate than to formulate in easily intelligible terms. So, as Thomasina points out, you can stir jam into your rice pudding, but you can never stir it out again. Similarly Valentine tells Hannah that her tea is getting cold by itself but it won’t spontaneously get hot, absorbing heat from the air in the room around it. The heat that was in the cup will spread out, not collect itself into a small concentration.
Although Thomasina doesn’t know enough mathematics to prove the law, she perceives its application, telling Noakes the designer of gothic gardens, that his steam-driven pump will never produce enough energy to keep itself running. Looking at her working papers 180 years later, Valentine is at first sure that she can’t have discovered the idea of increasing entropy avant la lettre: “Because there’s an order things can’t happen in” (sc. 7, p. 79). Soon, though, he has to concede that Thomasina was indeed writing about heat exchange:
She didn’t have the maths, not remotely. She saw what things meant, way ahead, like seeing a picture. (sc. 7, p. 93)
The discovery of the second law of thermodynamics caused a great deal of shock in the nineteenth century because it meant that life, the universe and everything would inevitably come to an end (at a point which might be so far in the future that nobody need worry about it). The effect of the shock distorted some people’s thinking, possibly including Thomasina’s. When, on the eve of her 17th birthday, Septimus shows her a French scientific paper, telling her that it confirms her earlier understanding and heretically departs from Newton, her first thought is that it must contradict determinism. Septimus replies:
No! … Well, perhaps. He shows that the atoms do not go according to Newton. (sc. 7, p. 81)
Thomasina, having read the French paper, summarizes its implications:
THOMASINA: Well! Just as I said! Newton’s machine which would knock our atoms from cradle to grave by the laws of motion is incomplete! Determinism leaves the road at every corner, as I knew all along, and the cause is very likely hidden in this gentleman’s observation.
LADY CROOM: Of what?
THOMASINA: The action of bodies in heat.
LADY CROOM: Is this geometry? (sc. 7, pp. 83–4)
Thomasina has, in a jocose and not wholly knowing way, prefigured Chloë’s observation as to the role of sex in the unpredictability of the world. Neither she nor Septimus is quite sure whether increasing entropy has implications for the validity of determinism. Septimus is more inclined instinctively to resist the idea (“No! … Well, perhaps”) than Thomasina is (“the cause is very likely hidden”). Such uncertainty and hedging are only to be expected, given what were perceived as the earth-shattering implications of the second law of thermodynamics at the time. The unsettling effect probably explains in part what later became of Septimus.
The play unfolds in two separate time-frames, but in the same room. Scenes 1, 3 and 6 are set in Thomasina Coverly’s schoolroom, where she is tutored by Septimus Hodge, a Cambridge graduate. It is 1809, and Thomasina is aged 13. Scenes 2, 4 and 5 take place in the same room in “the present day” (late 1980s or early 1990s). The long final scene 7 has the characters from both periods occupying the same space (for example, 20th-century Hannah and 19th-century Septimus drink from the same glass, filled from the same decanter, and Valentine and Septimus read separate copies of Thomasina’s essay). In this scene, Thomasina is about to turn 17 and we learn that she will die in a fire just after the play’s end. That circumstance, I suggest, is the other factor which helps to explain Septimus’s fate.
Two of the characters in the present day scenes are Hannah and Bernard. Hannah appears to be an independent scholar — she says she doesn’t teach — while Bernard is an academic expert on Byron. Hannah has written a book about Lady Caroline Lamb, which has been patronizingly reviewed by various Byronists including Bernard: “The Byron gang unzipped their flies and patronized all over it”, Hannah says, describing Bernard’s review as “a thousand words in the Observer to see me off the premises with a pat on the bottom” (sc. 2, p. 22). A description of the garden at Brocket Hall in Hannah’s Caro book led the present Lady Croom (Hermione, who unlike her forebear doesn’t appear on stage) to invite her to research the history of her garden at Sidley Park.
Bernard is there to look for information about an obscure (and according to Septimus and other characters, very bad) poet named Ezra Chater who (in a letter found in a book that had been in Byron’s library) challenged a man who had sex with Chater’s wife to a duel. Bernard is convinced that the person who was challenged was Byron himself, who killed Chater before fleeing the country. The audience (reader) can see that Bernard’s conjecture rests on a chain of shaky assumptions: that no man in the household was as likely as Byron to have slept with Mrs Chater; that it was surely he who wrote two mocking reviews of Chater’s books in an obscure periodical (which, unknown to Bernard, happened to have been edited by Septimus’s brother); that the bad poet and the amateur botanist who discovered a dwarf dahlia in Martinique could not have been the same person; and more besides.
Hannah is pursuing a less sensational (yet arguably more consequential) hypothesis and doing so rather more cautiously than Bernard. It is, moreover, one which changes as she accumulates evidence. During the 1809 scenes, Mr Noakes is fundamentally changing the character of the Sidley Park gardens. This is being done at the instance of Lord Croom, who doesn’t appear in the play; Lady Croom is not happy about it. She complains that Noakes’s sketches, which allow his new designs to be superimposed on the existing gardens, show an appalling transformation:
Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch. My hyacinth dell is become a haunt for hobgoblins, my Chinese bridge, which I am assured is superior to the one at Kew, and for all I know at Peking, is usurped by a fallen obelisk overgrown with briars — (sc. 1, p. 12
Hannah’s research shows that Noakes’s displacement of the “familiar pastoral refinement” has been preceded, barely 50 years earlier, by the destruction of the formal classical gardens that had been there before.
The history of the garden says it all, beautifully. There’s an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760, everything had gone — the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes — the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown. The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside. And then Richard Noakes came in to bring God up to date. By the time he’d finished it looked like this (the sketch book). The decline from thinking to feeling, you see. (sc. 2, p. 27)
She has discovered that Noakes’s hermitage had been occupied by a real, live hermit. He was “suspected of genius” but was ultimately found to be “off his head”: he had covered thousands of sheets of paper with “cabalistic proofs that the world was coming to an end”. Hannah sees this as a “perfect symbol” of the decline from the Enlightenment into Romanticism: “A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself”. The “decline” can be seen as analogous to entropy, with the qualification that it was “intellectual rigour” that made possible the discovery of the law of increasing entropy.
Bernard is impressed, possibly in spite of himself. Like Hannah, he seems to value eighteenth-century reason over nineteenth-century picturesque irregularity. Dismissing her book as “a novelette” (sc. 5, p. 59), he tells Hannah that she’s wrong about Byron and Caroline Lamb:
You got them backwards, darling. Caroline was Romantic waffle on wheels with no talent, and Byron was an eighteenth-century Rationalist touched by genius. (sc. 5, p. 60)
The audience doesn’t know what’s in Hannah’s book, so we have no means of judging whether Bernard is being fair to it and its author. However, we shouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he hadn’t read it all that attentively before writing his patronizing review. There’s certainly one respect in which he’s wrong about the book. He tries to persuade Hannah that the picture on the dust-jacket is of the wrong people. He shows her an article in the latest issue of the Byron Society Journal asserting that the sketch is “No earlier than 1820” (sc. 5, p. 62) and that Byron was in Italy when it was made. However, we know that (at least within the world of the play) Bernard, the Fuseli expert and the Byron Society Journal are wrong: both Septimus and Lady Croom say they saw Byron (and Lady Croom also mentions Caroline Lamb) being sketched by Fuseli at the Royal Academy (sc. 7, pp. 84–5).
Hannah comes to believe, but is unable to prove, that the Sidley Park hermit is Septimus himself. This causes her to adjust her theory slightly:
I thought my hermit was a perfect symbol. An idiot in the landscape. But this is better. The Age of Enlightenment banished into the Romantic wilderness! The genius of Sidley Park living on in a hermit’s hut! (sc. 5, p. 66)
She’s wrong about the genius of Sidley Park. Hannah is perhaps too ready to accept Valentine’s claim that Thomasina hadn’t discovered anything. Thomasina was the genius, as Septimus acknowledged more than once, for the last time when he returned her essay, having “given it an alpha in blind faith” (sc. 7, p. 96). But he was certainly a rationalist and Hannah’s reformulation might have been better if she had so described him.
Almost at the end of the final scene, Thomasina and Septimus were kissing periodically while he taught her to waltz. It’s clear that they were becoming close. She asked him to come to her room and he declined, so perhaps he later experienced survivor’s guilt, as well as grief. We must conclude that, after the young woman’s death by fire, her former tutor withdrew to the hermitage where he lived out the remaining 22 years of his life speculating wildly about the end of the world, an event that, as a result of her speculations, he had come to realize was inevitable.
Edition: Faber paperback, 1993 (reprinted with corrections)