Well, they didn't actually but they bloody well should have done! I have just returned - early - from the English Touring Theatre production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. I left at the interval but if I had been sitting in an aisle seat I would have left halfway through the first act. The director, Ms. Blanche McIntyre, should try her hand at directing traffic because based on this production directing actors is obviously beyond her.
It's difficult for me to go into critical detail because it assumes that you know the play which probably not many of you do. Suffice to say that one of the main 'characters' in the play is science, or to be precise, the Second Law and also Chaos Theory. (Fermat's Last Theorem also makes an appearance but only as a running gag - and yes, Stoppard is witty enough to make you laugh at such an abstruse subject!) But the first two, Chaos Theory and the Second Law are amongst the most fundamental and exciting theories in all of science. Yes, they're difficult to grasp in detail but Stoppard writes some terrific dialog which if delivered in the right way will get across to an unscientific audience their general principles and their huge cosmological importance.
Ah yes, 'delivery', and like all other plays, everything depends on delivery which in this case we did not get! They all rattled off their dialog at the speed of machine guns which gave the audience no chance to grasp the tricky concepts with which this play is concerned. The actor playing the young maths swot whose job it was to explain Chaos Theory sat throughout that particular scene at one end of a table facing across stage to the actress facing him so he had no chance to move, to hesitate, to point up certain facts and to show that the subject whilst difficult was also incredibly exciting. The fact that he, like virtually all the rest of the cast, was incapable of throwing his voice clearly to the back of the auditorium (where I was sitting - fuming!) meant that the stage-hands off stage left might have heard every word but I didn't!
I felt sorry for Dakota Blue Richards(!), the actress playing the key role of Thomasina Coverly, a character who starts the play on the eve of her 14th birthday. It's not Dakota's fault that she has such a dopey name but her daft parents deserve a slap! But anyway, she made no attempt to act the part of a 13-year-old girl. She looked and she sounded and she moved like a modern young woman. What Ms. Blanche 'Blind-as-a-bat' McIntyre was doing during rehearsals I do not know but directing she was not! Part of the emotional impetus of this play is that we see Thomasina as a very young girl in the first half but in the second she is on the cusp of her 17th birthday and is now a young woman and on the edge of falling love with her tutor. Thus, the contrast in ages is critical. Of course, in line with most of her fellow actors you couldn't hear much of what she said so the absence of any sort of 'body language' didn't help.
Finally - because I could go on and on and on - there was the final piece of contemporary political correctness which saw two black actors playing roles which are indubitably white. Sorry chaps, actually as actors you weren't too bad compared to some of the others but despite what The Guardian might tell you, black is black and white is white and you two stuck out like sore thumbs!
The only unalloyed pleasure I drew from this dreadful production as it slowly murdered one of the greatest plays of the 20th century was that as an amateur actor/director I need never take snooty condescension from professionals.
