Et in Arcadia ego

I still remember the moment when I realised that the throw-away joke that I used as the basis for a blog post was actually going to be a whole chapter of my PhD. That moment of exhilaration and clarity, gut instinct building on research discoveries and, for me, the cultural route into thinking about science.

That moment was brought vividly back to me in a warm London theatre last night on seeing Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia staged at the Old Vic. I first saw the play maybe 25 years ago at the Watford Palace Theatre. I still remember the feeling of magic appearing as the twin stories of contemporary scholarship and historical events unfolded around the same table.

Arcadia tells the story of Thomasina Coverly and her tutor Septimus Hodge in 1809, combined with scholars Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale in the present day with the contemporary Coverly family. As the regency story unfolds around Thomasina’s mathematical genius, Hodge’s friend Lord Byron, the redesign of the Coverly’s garden from the classical to the picturesque, and a tortoise called Plautus, Hannah and Bernard unearth different parts of this history through the family records, and draw different conclusions.

I’ve always had a bit of a crush on Septimus. I think you’re meant to. But more than that, Arcadia is a masterly tale of science, art, culture and human emotions, and, I think, a particularly exhilarating evocation of how historical research feels when you find a nugget: the gut reaction combined with a research feel for the next lead.

Looking back, I can now definitely credit Arcadia with planting a seed of fascination for the eighteenth century that I would come back to as an undergraduate. But, more so now, I can see the magic of scientific ideas unfurling through contemporary art and culture, and of the different modern-day disciplinary expertise that allows this to become visible.

The Old Vic adaption is beautifully staged. The play takes place around a table, and needs little more. But in setting this in an image of celestial orbits, with rotating staging, the production structures the play’s narrative against the Newtonian cosmos. At one point the two period’s characters rotate in different orbits, passing objects and papers between them. The materials of history pass from the past to the historians, mediated by their respective worlds.

Watching the play again all these years later, and with the added context of Stoppard’s recent death, I realise how few plays have stayed with me to this extent. I think the only other is Brecht’s Galileo, adapted by David Hare, that I saw at the National Theatre starring Simon Russel Beale in 2006. I think what both ultimately revealed to me is the complexity of intellectual history, which sounds rather dry, but crucially through the emotional and creative magic of history told with creative spark. Both also rely on the role of objects and documents.

I’ve turned 40 recently and been thinking a lot about what I want my career to be. Arcadia has helped remind me of that entwining of art and science through objects and images, that I increasingly realise is what makes me tick.