It may have taken Tom Stoppard's most elegant romp around the groves of academe some years to receive its first Irish production, but it was well worth waiting for and, first viewed in London several years ago, well worth seeing again. Ben Barnes's direction is more measured, more evenly paced, less colourful than was the direction of the Royal National Theatre's production, but it is none the less faithful to the complex construction and content of this most divertingly intelligent play.
Set in the stately Sidley Park in both 1809 and the present, it offers two intertwining detective stories in each of which the battles of calculus and algebra versus poetry and passion are separately fought out to indeterminate conclusions.
In 1809, young Thomasina Coverly might just have fathomed the mystery of iterative algorithms despite the indifference of her tutor, Septimus Hodge, friend of Lord Byron and dismisser of the poetry of Ezra Chater, with whose wife he had a carnal embrace in the gazebo on the estate. In the present, writer Hannah Jarvis tries to unearth the social history of the gardens at Sidley Park, and particularly the presence in the early 19th century of the hermit who lived on the estate, while the literary upwardly-mobile academic Bernard Nightingale is determined to implicate Lord Byron in Chater's putative murder and Valentine Coverly tries to use computerised iterative algorithms to predict the fate of grouse on the estate.
It appears to be the author's view that the outcome of all the research in both periods is trivial. What matters is the search to find out about people's existence and the whys and wherefores of their lives. In this, Mr Barnes and his uniformly admirable actors are of sterling assistance. In 1908, Thomasina's mother, Lady Croom (Susan FitzGerald), drops Wildean epigrams with absolute precision to great comic effect. Risteard Cooper's Septimus displays a highly-refined indifference to almost everything and everyone else. Miche Doherty is the perfectly pathetic cuckolded Chater (and funny with it), Barry McGovern the gothic landscape gardener come to change the lie of Sidley Park's land, David O'Brien the knowingly aloof butler, Jellaby, and Michael James Ford the blustering Lady Croom's brother. Jade Yourell is the pert and very bright Thomasina.
Today, Jeananne Crowley is the pertly intelligent and determined Hannah Jarvis, Rupert Frazer the brashly ambitious Nightingale, and Michael Devaney the vaguely computerised Valentine, son of the house and maybe Hannah's fiance. Olivia Caffrey is Chloe Coverly, Valentine's sister, more interested in the dance than in the intellectual debate, and Michael FitzGerald is touchingly young Gus and Augustus Coverly in both periods.
Everything in the Arcadian garden is not what it seems in either period, but the various journeys of discovery are well worth undertaking with so deft a play and such fine performances.
