Playing for Time (and Playing with Time) in Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia"

Author(s): Enoch Brater

Source: Comparative Drama , Summer 2005, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 157-168
Published by: Comparative Drama

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/41154273

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 Playing for Time
(and Playing with Time)
in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia
Enoch Brater

moves in odd and often unfamiliar ways in Tom Stoppards

theater, and no more so than in Arcadia, which opened in 1993 at
the National Theatre in London to great and much deserved critical ac-
claim. The playwright had already earned for himself a reputation as an
adventurous explorer of how time might be made to work on a modern
and technically sophisticated Western European stage. In Travesties, The
Real Inspector Hound, Indian Ink, and the landmark play that made ev-
ery theater practitioner take note, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead, Stoppard s surprising arrangements for the relationship between
stage time and stage space are nothing if not profoundly provocative and
stylistically liberating. Stoppard is clever, sometimes in his earlier works
too clever by half. Yet even in those first attempts at dramatic writing he
made soon after abandoning his career as a theater critic for the Bristol
press,1 there was something at once hilarious and disturbing about an
inquisitive mind turning its attention to the eccentricities of movement
and meaning on a busy and bulky stage set. So much so that the appeal of
his work quickly reached far beyond the specialized range of the most
highly informed theater vocabulary. Physics, philosophy, iterated loga-
rithms, Fermât s last theorem, Lord Byron, steam engines, landscape ar-
chitecture, carnal knowledge and hermits all became essential parts of
his new Arcadian game plan. Postmodern pastiche would now frame the
ongoing debate between classicism and romanticism. As Beckett might
have said (and as in fact he did say), "The rest is Ibsen."2

157

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 158 Comparative Drama

This essay aims to turn the discus

the logistics of the proscenium, to the
stage, and to suggest how his carefu
ters our perception of the intersect
past. How do such integers, subject t
terpretation, claim a dynamic life for
that is also known as dramatic illusion?
Stoppard s rich allusive texture should clue us in to at least one thing:
this writer is no mere innocent when it comes to understanding how
stage space has been used before to accommodate any number of unpre-
dictable time signatures. His reinvention of Shakespeare's dialogue has,
of course, been richly celebrated, as has his retooling and refashioning of
lines borrowed, sometimes with reckless abandon, from Samuel Beckett
and Oscar Wilde. Less noted, perhaps- but not by Stoppard- is the way
such playwrights have structured stage space to accelerate, decelerate,
and in some cases even stop time completely. Let us review for a moment
what Stoppard may have learned from them.
Shakespeare has always been a lively subject for Stoppard, just as he
remains the usual suspect for any discussion of how time has been put to
work efficiently on the Western stage. Even the most famous example we
might lift from The Winters Tale, the figure of Father Time who speaks
midway through the unfolding action to mark the passage of sixteen
years, is nothing more than a stage device to take the plays narrative
energy forward. His speech urges us to "imagine" with him what this
spectacle is unwilling or unable or simply disinclined to show. Personifi-
cation here is an engine of choice; this play, which includes the sudden
appearance of a bear in hot pursuit of a supporting player, as well as a
statue that miraculously comes to life, has in any case made liberal use of
what stage characters have been asked to do. Directors who try to trump
the Bard in this regard will usually do so at their peril. The second scene
of Othello, for example, suggestively retraces the blocking of the first, the
one in which we meet Roderigo and lago almost naturalistically, mid-
speech, walking down a street in a Venice of Shakespeares invention.
How much time passes between these two scenes anyway, the second of
which deftly replaces Roderigo with Othello as a parallel outdoor "conver-
sation" continues? And talk of miraculous appearances: in act 1, scene 3,

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Enoch Brater 159

Desdemona, who lodg

in line 1 15, just bef
the Senate, only to a
and many gorgeous
That speech itself,
past made time prese
guage is made to do.
and through space: w
as he takes us on a f
time frames. This m
days," "battles, sieg
dents by flood and
breach," "slavery"
"Anthropophagi," th
beneath their should
Othello tells the add
Desdemonas "world
haven't even made i
Shakespeares audienc
Moving quickly thro
pletely-or at the ver
the vast Shakespeare
Soliloquies,
generally
nonetheless pose a t
ample, to the beatin
live in the instance o
culiar show time, arr
so often been told, s
"thinking aloud," wh
an act of spontaneou
Stage time has of co
for its ability to con
with assurance of a s
might very well be
ment, stretches it ou
so to speak, still. In

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160 Comparative Drama

right in front of our very eyes bef

lished "play time" is permitted to re
In his late plays Beckett, the "Wha
invokes with so much brio in Rosen
is especially sensitive to this partic
basing a complete dramatic work on
who has witnessed works like Footfa
not but feel that their running time i
minutes in one case, fourteen in th
longueurs. In these time plays it is the
and expands an otherwise fleetin
Beckettian evocations the past is qui
future, too," as Mary Tyrone intone
"We all try to lie out of it," O'Neill ha
stage life] won't let us."
Like Shakespeare and Beckett bef
man of the theater, and he knows
make time circulate freely.3 In Othello
as a handkerchief is made to play it
and it will do so again as the incrim
Real Thing. Even before Shakespeare
be traced all the way back to the h
gives it to Othellos father who giv
passes it on to their son. In time (an
here) it passes into the hands of Des
finally lago, who promptly makes u
effective "ocular proof" of Desdem
no clocks in Othello, but that overly
serve as one. So too does Wilde allow
to carry so much temporal weight.
ward from one scene to the next, fr
and it is not until that same prop is
where it belongs that time is finally
slowly falls. An apple and a tortois
exercise a similar mantic power in T

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 Enoch Brater 161

II

Stoppard s fascination with the choreography of stage time on a circum-

scribed playing space can be observed even in his earliest work. All
playwrights in a certain sense share the same preoccupation, but some
make their audiences more conscious of it than others. Papa Ibsen learned
how to channel that equation into a highly flexible dramatic technique,
often to help us appreciate the dynamics of how time functions in off-
stage space to advance the plot. In A Dolls House, for example, Mrs. Linde
sits quietly on the set while we hear the muffled sounds of a party taking
place in some imagined room in another family's home "upstairs"; and
as The Wild Duck begins, we hear the clatter of a dinner party long be-
fore the hosts open the parlor door to confront an unexpected guest who
waits for them, alone, onstage. Stoppard called his early play Enter a Free
Man his "Flowering Death of a Salesman,"4 referring to the influence of
Robert Bolts Flowering Cherry as well as to Arthur Miller s landmark
work of 1949. Yet even his flippant remark reveals a certain homage for
the sad tale of Willy Loman and the brilliant stage solution Miller, work-
ing in collaboration with his director Elia Kazan and his designer Jo
Mielziner, found for portraying scenes both inside and outside a
character s head. Imagine for a moment how tempting a stage direction
like this might have been for a young playwright, fresh from the
Edinburgh Festival, hell-bent on resetting some new stage clocks of his
own: "Whenever the action is in the present the actors observe the imagi-
nary wall-lines, entering the house only through its door at the left. But,
in the scenes of the past, these boundaries are broken, and characters
enter or leave a room by stepping 'through' a wall onto the forestage."5
Sam Shepard uses simultaneous sets in Fool for Love and A Lie of the
Mind, and even Beckett thought of using one in his unproduced play
Eleuthéria, written just before he started writing Waiting for Godot.6
Closer to home, Stoppard could find ample precedent for playing with
time in the work of J. B. Priestley, whose dramas like Time and the
Conways and / Have Been There Before take their audiences from the
present to the past, then back to the present again, in order to allow the
passage of time to make its own social commentary and its own stinging
revelations. Among his British contemporaries, too, Stoppard s orches-
tration of stage time is full of cross-references. In Betrayal Harold Pinter s

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162 Comparative Drama

nine scenes move backward and for

journey into the past; and the wor
with all sorts of temporal eccentri
only one set and only one large tab
separate dinner parties staged simulta
ing). Caryl Churchills supper club m
same list of permutations: in Top G
Dull Gret, and Patient Griselda, figur
together with feminist purposefuln
restaurant reserved for them by th
In outlining such a rich and vari
with time, my intention is not only
serious investigator of contempora
Arcadia should make that abundant
tice is the originality and sheer w
conventions. The use of stage time
Dead is both parodie and farcical at
ous. The work achieves its most im
esizes two compelling and intersect
the "real" Hamlet in performance u
determining the fate of two bit pl
being framed in a third and final s
new play. Patterns proliferate and
they have been designed to do so a
within-the-play that constitutes Th
two definitely not first-string theate
Don Quixote, who mistake stage fi
provincial production of an Agatha Ch
selves caught in the mousetrap of t
the-frame. And by the time Stoppard
Aristotelian dramatic unities, equatin
seriously amuck, as has any sembla
and Tristan Tzara never met in Zur
do so in Stoppards play. Stage tim
conflated: we are at various times
and at other times at a rehearsal o
produced by the British Consulate. W

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 Enoch Brater 163

narrator, Henry Carr

brance of things pas
during the First Wor
three things in Zuri
speech Stoppard has
ther a revolutionary o
an artist as anything
well be a revolutiona
Compared to these
twenty years later i
Arcadia the playwri
Regency and postmo
(with the occasional
tated to appear spon
manipulated to show
Stoppard said, "is wha
sion of matters erotic
serves as its own em
Hannah Jarvis near
predetermined unfo
how nature creates i
would add, the scale
plished of Stoppard's w
line and controlling
playwright exploits

Ill

Arcadia, the play in two acts its author called "a thriller and a romantic
tragedy with jokes,"10 pursues its dual time frames with authority, clarity,
and a great deal of stylistic discretion and precision. Each act is paced
differently, as are the separate periods evoked in the coordinated tempo-
ral realities. All action, divided as it is, nonetheless takes place in the same
"room on the garden front of a very large country house in Derbyshire"
{Arcadia, 1). Stoppard's stately home is called Sidley Hall, and though
its gardens seem to resemble Stourhead in Wiltshire, he was probably
thinking all the while of Chatsworth, not far from where he and his

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164 Comparative Drama

brother Peter lived with his Czech-

husband, retired army officer Ken
tionality he took. At Sidley Hall th
this: in the four scenes of the first
always featured separately. All bets ar
"just at the point the audience thinks
the playwright has said, "you have
the play is therefore arranged some
ing like a deconstructionist on a par
nique he has used before in Indian
characters from the two time perio
onstage together, though they do n
further complicated when a charact
to play his ancestor in the past, tho
required to do so. Hannah, a reader
author who knocks off popular how
Hannah throughout, as does the des
who yearns for headlines and never
is his mantra as well as the last word
gesture" as he noisily exits the play {A
large cast, such as Septimus Hodge,
romantic figure, and the nothing if
much a product of their time that S
them where they are.
Stoppard s play benefited enormo
London staging. Taking full advant
tech efficiency, as well as an A-list ca
Walter, Bill Nighy, Emma Fielding, Sa
memorable production relied on its
music to track and trace the fluidity
ing the text, and collaborating wit
time look "real," emphasizing its com
433-37). In Arcadia props cross time
visualization of period doubling. And
drama that contributes just as forcefu
acters talk in Arcadiay and talk they d
speak with dramatic accuracy and ap

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Enoch Brater 165

move through tim

period exclamation l
tooshy mediated as i
to contemporary Eng
invents a faux-perio
his figures from the
in exactly the sam
Thomasina, age thirt
the two of them s
"youngins." Their in
"grouse" and "mutto
back and forth thro
careful to avoid the "n
early nineteenth-cen
postmodern edge to it
selves, ironically, as
on the other hand, s
best face she can to p
dame extraordinaire.
half Sheridans Mrs. M
Poetry in this manufa
Ezra Chater s "Couch
time (and here Engl
make even "the idiot
Stoppard s character
just as time-bound,
another hundred yea
as their ancestors. H
that her speech dates
simply isn't worth th
includes a license for
of the same name, w
Times, was not at all
the most delusional o
his jargon. A don on
the academic" Stopp
removed from the ce

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 166 Comparative Drama

his name a household word, his fift

further when his shoddy research i
Gus Coverly, age fifteen, doesn't sp
play he holds all the cards in his ha
what tattered stiff-backed folio f
"'Septimus holding Plautus'," Hann
that" (Arcadia, 97). His silence speak
excellent hermit, if only he had bee

IV

Products of a language that is also shown to be as mutable as time itself,

all definitions and classifications in Arcadia are equally layered, limited,
and suspect. They also show themselves to be just as flexible. Stoppard s
playing with time is partially sited in an uneasy past at the very moment
when one Zeitgeist is about to give birth to another. The garden we see
through this set s elaborate window frame within the stage frame is there-
fore the subject of considerable intrigue. Historical as well as horticul-
tural revisionism is in the air. Time plays. The classical symmetry of
Capability Browns five hundred acres is about to be undone by Culpa-
bility Noakes in the New Age appetite for the "picturesque," complete
with grottos, hermitage and "everything but vampires." The gothic scen-
ery of The Castle ofOtranto is about to take root and assert its supremacy
in Sidley Parks very own backyard (13). Lady Croom, whose patronage
of landscape architecture includes as many trysts in the glass pavilion as
her busy schedule allows, couldn't be more put out by all of the fuss such
a radical transformation involves. And yet the very English classicism
threatened here, what this play calls "Capability Brown doing Claude,
who was doing Virgil," is as much a fashion as the romantic claptrap that
is about to replace it (26). Each age re-creates itself in the image it makes
of the past. That classicism so lately lamented was at its best only an
imitation of an imitation, a Roman villa landscape remade as Renaissance-
Italian before such a dolce stil no longer nuovo became the going fashion
in England s green and pleasant land. Not to worry: the picturesque style
wont last long. It, too, will be undone by time.
For Stoppard s modern-day figures, caught in a detective story that
is also partly a romance, recuperating the past turns out to be the same

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Enoch Brater 167

sort of zero- sum ga

what curious minds
have never really hap
matters: and you wa
room temperature."
story-telling" (93). In
Stoppard s most inst
perception takes plac
that was even mor
1 999 at the Donmar W
the playwright-prot
special feeling for H
on a scene from a p
next scene begins. O
the play-within-the-
its disposal for the pe
of staging time. In
when it suddenly re
doing what it always
used to be called "th
In Stoppard's playin
almost anything ca
physics, time really
manipulate it to crea
characters from dua
of all ways to end a
wags put on Regenc
she sits at a table stre
out just what happe
England, "Brideshea
music of time contin
as one. Stoppard, a f
musicians to play "Yo
betterabout it.14

Longing to discover s
about the world of S

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 168 Comparative Drama

Arcadia's thoroughly modern chara

warp that is theater. Stoppard uses th
one more time signature in the ove
such they begin to paint themselves
Arcadia. Like the donors kneeling at
artwork - think, for example of M
Maria Novella- they are both inside
somehow, simultaneously, outside of
have been doing all along, but witho
but also playing with the convention
unity that is Stoppard s most masterf

University of M

NOTES

1 For Stoppard s work as a journalist, see Ira Nadel, Tom Stoppard: A life (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002), 58-77.

2 Beckett quoted in Enoch Brater, The Essential Samuel Beckett (London: Thames and Hudson
2003), 107.

3 On this point, see Andrew Sofer, The Stage life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2003).

4 See Nadel, 89

5 See Millers stage directions for the opening scene in Death of a Salesman (New York:
Viking, 1949), 18.

6 See Brater, 62-63

7 Tom Stoppard, Travesties (London: Faber, 1975), 98-99.

8 See Nadel, 434.

9 Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (London: Faber, 1993), 47.

10 Stoppard quoted by Nadel, 434.

11 Ibid., 442.

12 See David Perkins, ed., English Romantic Writers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1 967), 788.

13 Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (London: Faber, 1972), 36.

14 See Nadel, 433.

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