Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” is witty, erudite and cunningly structured. David Leveaux’s revival, which opened on Broadway last night, looks handsome, and its cast, including Billy Crudup and Raúl Esparza, does fine, nuanced work.
But boy, is the show tedious.
If you’ve seen Stoppard’s other work, most recently the trilogy “The Coast of Utopia,” you know the drill: He does lots of research, then has characters mouth it back to us. Invisible footnotes dangle from every other line.
“Arcadia” takes place in the main room of the English estate of Sidley Park. With its high ceilings and marble walls, it looks like a fascist dictator’s memorial — though the real problem is that Hildegard Bechtler’s set creates terrible acoustics.
While the location remains the same, the action alternates between the 19th century and the present day — until the last scene, when characters from both eras share the stage.
The period characters, especially the precocious Thomasina Coverly (Bel Powley) and her tutor, Septimus Hodge (Tom Riley), handle most of the play’s emotional load, while the contemporary inhabitants try to parse what happened in the house centuries earlier.
Stoppard makes this historical sleuthing somewhat interesting, as past and present gradually
fill in the puzzle. Then again, A.S. Byatt did the same thing more successfully in her 1990 novel “Possession,” three years before “Arcadia.”
The show goes down easily enough. Stoppard has a way with bon mots, though he can be precious: “Do not dabble in paradox,” Lady Croom (Margaret Colin, marvelously unflappable) admonishes her brother in the early 1800s. “It puts you in danger of fortuitous wit.” Worse, Powley’s squeaky readings make Thomasina’s quips sound as if she’s on “The Big Bang Theory.”
Whether he’s dealing with the laws of thermodynamics or Romanticism vs. Classicism, Stoppard avoids jargon and lets the audience feel pleased about itself for attending such a smart show. In its own way, this is as pandering as “Mamma Mia!”
Never mind that what’s onstage feels mechanically plotted, or that you care little for these chattering people. Only Lia Williams and Billy Crudup — as a writer and an ambitious academic, respectively — fully suggest the passion and drive that fuel intellectual investigation.
Otherwise, “Arcadia” feels like a loop-de-loop feeding on its own cleverness. It’s easy to admire, but hard to love.