CityLife

Arcadia

Arcadia

Arcadia
The Lowry
September 24, 2010

Manchester Library Theatre Company is in Salford – the Quays at The Lowry – as its stage venue for the next four years or so. And there’s no let-up in the quality of its work, with Chris Honer’s staging of Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard, the first production of the new era.

The set is beautifully constructed (designed by Judith Croft), music and sound (Jon Nicholls) and lighting (James Whiteside) all work effectively, and the casting is top-notch.

The play? I guess you’ll either love it or hate it: I love it. It’s about … well, loads of things, as Stoppard typically is, but 19th century English Romantic sensibility and present-day academic pretensions loom large.

Then there’s literature, maths, philosophy, gardening, the second law of thermodynamics…  all hung around an alternation of periods (1809-13 and now) in a Derbyshire country house, with both stories happening simultaneously by the end.

Since the present day bit is about the meaning of the 1809 bit, there’s a lot of the whodunnit about it, too, which means all the details must be crystal-clear, something Honer and his actors triumphantly achieve.

(There’s also so much going on in Stoppard’s text that you can never keep up with it all, but thankfully he gives short cuts for those of us who get left behind).

James Wallace (Nightingale) and Cate Hamer (Hannah Jarvis), as minor university English don with a king-sized ego, and nail-hard history writer, were first among equals for brilliantly observed our-time characterization. Alasdair Craig (Valentine Coverly) and Caroline Bartleet (Chloë Coverly) strongly supported them.

In the period-piece acting, Emma Gregory’s Lady Croom was a virtuosic incarnation of noblesse dirige (she got most laughs for pure delivery of the lines), Charlie Anson fascinating as the most real and yet most mysterious intellectual, Septimus Hodge, Leigh Symonds (Chater) and Richard Heap (Noakes) great type-studies as dull poet and dour landscaper respectively, and Christopher Wright the perfect butler (Jellaby).

Beth Park, a relative newcomer, made a strong impression as Thomasina, a teenager  at the dawn of erotic awareness who happens to be a mathematical genius – quite an assignment, but she did it.

Until October 9, 2010.