Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and: Sarah Kane's Blasted (review)

The expanding series of Modern Theatre Guides from Continuum now counts ten volumes, each offering an approximately hundred-page discussion of a well-known play. The series includes Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, August Wilson's Fences, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, David Mamet's Oleanna, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Sarah Kane's Blasted, Patrick Marber's Closer, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and Tony Kushner's Angels in America. The general preface refers to them as "key plays of modern times," although the series so far consists only of English-language works. Each volume starts with a detailed overview of the playwright's career, and the series includes only one play to represent each playwright's oeuvre. While one might argue the editors' choice of plays, these little theatre guides prove to be convenient sources for in-depth studies of single plays. Sections on the playwrights' backgrounds compensate in large measure for the representative-play approach, and the guides can only encourage readers to pursue additional plays.

These are workmanlike productions, each volume uniformly divided into "Background and Context," "Analysis and Commentary," "Production History," and "Workshopping the Play." In the back is a useful timeline, situating the play among major political and cultural events, and several pages of "Further Reading," followed by references and a detailed index. The guides offer not just compilations of facts and summaries of other scholars' research, but also original insights from people who have already published extensively on the subject. The two studies of British plays I examined are for the most part engagingly written and equally informative.

Unlike the socialist and feminist Caryl Churchill, to whom another volume in the series is devoted (see Theatre Topics, March 2009), Tom Stoppard is considered an apolitical (read conservative) playwright who writes "flashy" and "intellectualist" plays. Yet, as John Fleming points out, Stoppard was involved in humanist causes related to the former Soviet Union, and he never avoids important moral issues. The breadth and scope of his oeuvre are astonishing, from straightforward, realistic plays of epic dimensions (e.g., the trilogy The Coast of Utopia [2002]) to comedic and brainy plays of ideas like Arcadia (1993), probably one of the most discussed plays in recent theatre history. Widely referred to as the best science play, it has spawned a number of articles and websites that use the play to explain such arcane matters as Fermat's Last Theorem, thermodynamics, fractal geometry, and chaos theory, making it a particularly daunting subject for a brief study. Fleming wisely keeps science discussions to a minimum and does not dwell overly long on what is a far more difficult problem: the relationship between scientific content and theatrical form. Many will find his section on the play's production history of particular interest, because Arcadia is more challenging to produce than might be suggested by its limited cast and single set. Actors have to learn to bring out the humor and sexiness in lines that deal with complex theories. The play's popular success, Fleming argues, should be attributed to Stoppard's decision to switch directors from Peter Wood, who until then had directed all his major plays, to Trevor Nunn, known for his ability to tease out emotional subtexts, even in arcane material.

Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995) presents a very different kind of production challenge. Its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre was panned by critics, who were unable to look beyond the play's shocking imagery. Kane's suicide in 1999 led to another ill-considered critical approach—a stunned or awed reconsideration of her work as a sort of diary of depression. Since Aleks Sierz's In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2001) and Graham Saunders's "Love Me or Kill Me": Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (2002), Kane's work has been the subject...