I know, because in the first ever production of Arcadia, I heard Harriet Walter’s Lady Croom do exactly that every night. I played Valentine (a brilliant, modern-day mathematician). In my audition, I read for the Byronic tutor Septimus, but I could tell that Tom and Trevor Nunn had someone else in mind (and when I met Rufus Sewell, I realised why).
The stars aligned in that production in other ways: two months into the run, on June 23 1993, Tom’s voice came over the National Theatre tannoy: “Ladies and gentlemen of the Arcadia company: news from Cambridge. Fermat’s Last Theorem was solved this morning.” That night, Septimus’s line, “Fermat’s Last Theorem has kept people busy for a hundred and fifty years” got a burst of applause. Fermat conjectured his theorem in 1637. What the odds were of us doing a performance 356 years later on the very day the theorem was solved, I can’t imagine. Proof that Tom had his finger on the pulse.
He’s one of the few playwrights who gets his own adjective. So what does Stoppardian actually mean? Beyond the wit and the wordplay, I think it’s some “form as content” thing that ties the structure and theme together in a deeply satisfying way. In 1993, I was a young actor who’d done Physics and Maths at A Level. I knew about what physicists call sensitive dependence on initial conditions, in which a tiny change in a system can produce huge differences later on. It lies at the heart of chaos, and it lies at the heart of the play. Arcadia’s tumble of misunderstandings start from the smallest mistakes. The play glories in misunderstandings, and allows an audience, wise to at least some of them, to feel clever.
Stoppard for me is Why are we here?, but with jokes. Arcadia has a really good laugh after only two lines (“Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef”). Tom always had a soft spot for the quick laugh: The Invention of Love, The Real Inspector Hound and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead all start with immediately funny situations.
