from The Oxford Times

JOKES, JIBES - PUNS AND PARODY

What might you label the choice of Stoppard's Arcadia for an amateur company of players, even one so distinguished as our own City of Oxford Theatre Guild? High risk or safe cert?

The high risk factor is the sheer sustained polish required to interpret Stoppard's intellectual games and verbal pyrotechnics. his switches of time and place, his breathtaking flow of jokes and jibes, puns and parody, insight and obfuscation.

Stoppard gives no quarter. A missed cue, fluffed line or false move and the enchanted castle collapses. The very props piling up on the schoolroom table must be just so. And that includes the tortoise.

Add to that the daring decision to hand over to sixth-formers responsibility for three main parts and the music! It really is tightrope-walking stuff.

The safe cert is the bankability of Stoppard himself, now greatly boosted by the Shakespeare in Love phenomenon, while the prescence of Arcadia on the A-level syllabus (a true Stoppardian 'cert') guarantees substantial coach-party attendance.

Combine the two and you have a warmly-expectant audience and a cast psyched-up but with the assurance that comes from intensive rehearsal. Then you notice the directors are two of the Guild's greatest stalwarts, Peter Malin and Georgina Ferry. You are in safe hands. The performance is superb and the theatre's jam-packed.

Arcadia is no child's play, though it's protagonist is a teenage maths genius, Thomasina. Stoppard keeps us at full stretch - if not panting in his wake - as he shifts between the picturesque Byronic disorder of 1809 and the feuding academic researchers and telly-dons of today. The pace quickens, the themes interlock, the centuries mingle in the final waltz.

The company, finely-honed, keep the glittering dialogue moving, on Peter Ledwith's classic geometric set subtly lit by David Long. Even their gaits are apt - a strut for the cuckold rhymer Chater, a bumptious stamp for the naval bonehead Brice.

The sixth-formers all excel - Noonie Al Abbas as buxom Chloe; Ben Speedy as Gus and Anna Glynn as Thomasina - too distracting for her tutor, Septimus (James Moore). For the moderns, Lindsay Sandison is outstanding as the sharp Hannah. Rob Reynolds as the cad Bernard delivers his bogus-lecture brilliantly.

They get it all wrong, of course. The past is another country. But "better to struggle on" as Hannah says, and mankind still does.

Jeannine Alton

from The Oxford Mail

FIRST NIGHT:

EVEN by the standards of wit and invention for which he is known, Tom Stoppard produced a corker in his 1992 National Theatre hit Arcadia, stylishly revived this week by the City of Oxford Theatre Guild.

Bright ideas about art, science and the pursuit of knowledge flash and fizz in a script not short on clever jokes for which the writer is famed.

Show-off he may be, but it's great fun being shown off to in this tale, which combines a fascinating piece of present-day literary detective work at an English stately home with events, some rather saucy, that occured there in 1809.

Directors Peter Malin and Georgina Ferry set so fast a pace (quite properly) that it's sometimes difficult to take everything in. Better, I think to enjoy the oddball assortment of characters we meet on the way.

These include a pair of sparring literary historians, beautifully played by Lindsay Sandison and Rob Reynolds, and a pert 19th-century schoolgirl (excellent Anna Glynn) with a precocious interest in both algebra and the attractive Old Harrovian (James Moore) who tutors her in it.

Chris Gray