“Arcadia” and other creations
I: “Arcadia” at the Old Vic.
What do we know and how do we know it? The plays of Tom Stoppard are about knowledge - epistemology - as the most valuable part of human existence, though their terrain often also includes what cannot be known. His “Arcadia” (1992) is now being revived at the Old Vic, which has been reconfigured so that the play, best known in proscenium-arch spaces, is given in the round. Although I saw and reviewed the original production of “Arcadia” a number of times, and although I have seen at least two other productions, the experience of rediscovering now it is thrilling, hilarious, moving. I miss the original idea of an oval room that affords a view of a landscaped English garden, but I welcome the in-the-round intimacy that often makes us feel that we are in the same quasi-laboratory as Stoppard’s characters.
From its premiere on, “Arcadia” has been one of the rare modern masterworks that has filled me with wonder that we live in a world that has produced so miraculous work of art. How marvellous, thirty-four years after the premiere, that the miracle still lives in performance.
Like several other Stoppard plays, “Arcadia” alternates between two time zones. (All the action occurs in the same room, in an English country house.) In the early nineteenth-century scenes - Lord Byron, who never appears, is often mentioned - the characters include a teenage girl genius, Thomasina, whose brilliant researches anticipate the later discoveries of quantum physics. The modern scenes involve three different researchers - one of them investigating quantum physics, one of them in pursuit of Lord Byron, a third of them hunting up the origins of a hermitage in the house’s gardens. Stoppard constructs multiple layers of emotion, of comedy, and of poignancy from the various discoveries - and errors. The way he connects the play’s several characters has the perfect beauty of a wonderfully unfolding pattern. Even when you know the play, you can hardly believe how it contains advanced science, sex, Romantic poetry, landscape gardening, dahlias, scholarship, and much more.
In Carrie Cracknell’s production, the heart-seizing roles of Thomasina and her tutor Septimus are particularly well taken, by Isis Hainsworth and Seamus Dillane. In no previous production have I seen Thomasina grow up so tellingly during the play. Here, in her final scenes, she has achieved a debutante near-adult quality that considerably heightens our emotion about this wonderful and tragicomic character.
Diction, admittedly, could and should be crisper throughout the production. Even in a conventional theatrical space, Stoppard’s lines should be firmly delivered, as in Congreve or Wilde, but the challenges of projecting them in the round are harder yet. Nonetheless this miracle is alive again.
II: Joyce DiDonato as Purcell’s Dido on CD.
In February 2024, Joyce DiDonato performed Purcell’s “DIdo and Aeneas” at the Barbican Hall with the Pomo d’Oro ensemble, conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev. This was my first encounter with the singers Beth Taylor (singing the Sorceress) and Hugh Cutting (the Spirit), both of whom made immediately striking impressions on me - while DiDonato excelled herself as the tragic queen of Carthage.
Now we have a CD recording (Warner Classics) of this DiDonato Pomo d’Oro account: it seems to me a definitive rendition of an opera I have known for over fifty years and of which I have many recordings. Above all, it shows the artistry of DiDonato at its most eloquent. Is there another singer today who can colour individual words while never losing the overall shape of her music or stepping out of character?
III: Paul Lewis and Allan Clayton in Schubert’s “Winterreise”.
For many of us, Schubert’s song-cycle “Winterreise” is one of the supreme peaks of music, a work that still astonishes almost two hundred years after its creation. (Schubert’s last professional task was to correct the proofs.) The arc it traces over seventy or more minutes is a journey through successive stages of bleak weather and heartbreak. Although it has been sung superbly by basses, sopranos, baritones, and mezzosopranos (DiDonato among them), it was conceived for the tenor voice; and the right tenor can be singularly satisfying here. I’ve loved the singing of the tenor Allan Clayton in opera, in oratorio, and in concert. He has been singing Schubert’s “Winterreise” for some years, sometimes in an orchestral version by Hans Zender, but his January 31 performance at the Wigmore Hall, with Paul Lewis at the piano, was the first time I’d heard him sing it.
In Lewis’s hands, this was a great “Winterreise”. (My previous “Winterreise” pianists have included Daniel Barenboim and Alfred Brendel.) Lewis emerged as a marvellous Schubert player in the 1990s: he shapes it as architecture and as psychodrama, all with classical eloquence. In the final song, “Der Leiermann”, he crushed the grace notes into the succeeding main notes to brilliant effect, a slight liberty that hauntingly intensified the repeated drone effect here.
Still, Schubert showed Clayton’s limitations. No, his bright diction could not be improved; the clarion sound of his voice is marvellous. He could yet be a great “Winterreise” interpreter. He grasps the song cycle’s overall shape, which he begins vividly and ends touchingly. But his phrasing lacks complete legato fluency. At times his vibrato is too intrusive; occasionally, by contrast, he irons any vibrato from notes to make an artificially expressive effect.
IV: Sea Beneath the Skin.
I would love to hear Clayton sing the taxing tenor part in Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde”. His gifts - notably heroic delivery and pelllucid diction - are not unlike those of the American tenor Sean Panikkar, whose singing of it was the main event of a peculiar staging at the Barbican Hall on Sunday 1. The conductor Nino Coelho directed the Britten Sinfonia (which played gorgeously) in a chamber version of Mahler’s score; Fleur Barron sang the mezzosoprano role, at first making nothing of the words, and sometimes short-changing Mahler’s phrases. Her voice is attractive and affecting, but this was an immature account of great music.
The staging was directed by Lemi Bonifasio. I’m informed that the Samoan islands from which the rituals derived are all only a few feet above sea-level; Bonifasio projected some indistinct black-and-white films that showed shorelines engulfed by rising tides as well as Hiroshima-type mushroom clouds. As sound, the rituals did not accord with Mahler; as drama, their emphasis on sombre solemnity clashed with Mahler’s celebration of the world’s beauty.
V: Alena Baeva in Prokofiev’s second violin concerto.
On Sunday 1 with the Philharmonia, the violinist Alena Baeva (replacing Hilary Hahn) gave an electrifying account of Prokofiev’s second violin concerto. In the first and second movements, her playing was both incisive and sweet - a glorious but bewildering blend: sound that slices deliciously into the senses. She then played the third movement in a quite different style, with wildly fierce attack. Throughout, she also communicated her own love of playing.
Santtu-Matias Rouvali conducted with characteristic purposefulness and detail. One of London’s several recent Russian-diaspora concerts, this also included two dance scores: Stravinsky’s Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la fée” and Rachmaninov’s “Symphonic Dances”. I’ve enjoyed both scores as accompaniments to ballets, but, although each is also a good vehicle for an orchestra, neither shows its composer at his most imaginative. The Prokofiev second violin concerto, however, though so much less well known than the first, is one of this composer’s most marvellous creations. At two moments, he lets us know he’s working on the now familiar “Romeo and Juliet”; at a later point, he includes castanets, to show he was composing it in Spain. (He later wrote of the “nomad-like” existence he was living at the time of composing.) Yet these are distractions from the main energy and imaginative thrust of this concerto. I hope London hears Baeva play this again - and many other concerti - before long.
VI: Leonid Desyatnikov’s “Songs of Bukovina”.
At a lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 4, the young pianist Lily Petrova played the Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov’s “Songs of Bukovina - 24 Preludes” (2017). Desyatnikov is best known for having composed multiple scores (some commissioned, one a three-act narrative) for the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. At a time when mighty few modern composers are creating dance-friendly music, at least in the classical-music domain, Desyatnikov is a distinguished and versatile exception to the rule.
The Bukovina of these piano pieces’ title is geographically in Carpathia - part of Ukraine. Desyatnikov’s score abounds in folk music ideas, which he adapts and modernises. Ratmansky uses parts of this score in 2017 in a creation for American Ballet Theatre. It’s good to hear the complete work, however, and to read the poetic cues that Desyatnikov appends to each item (“X. A swallow has flown in: The bearer of news and a sign of return.
“XI. A cuckoo cuckooed in the house on the corner, on the rose: An omen intimate and unavoidable.
“XII. If only mother had known: Maternal protection, imagined too late.”) In 2022, in reaction to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Desyatnikov left Russia; he has now settled in Israel.
“Songs of Bukovina” is dense, high-concentrate writing that calls for virtuoso pianism. Although Petrova looked and dressed like the student I believe she is, she delivered this difficult score with complete command.
VII: The Dance of Death at the Orange Tree.
How much excellence can you see in a week? For me, this last week has been a my-cup-floweth-o’er period, building up to a “Dance of Death” at the Orange Tree, Richmond, that transforms Strindberg’s dark and searing play. You can have seen the film of Laurence Olivier’s performance (a few senior theatre-goers still remember seeing him live in this play); you can have seen Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren perform it earlier this century in the West End; and yet still this production creates new room in your heart and mind for the director Richard Eyre’s revelatory new rendition of this play. The performances of the bitterly married couple by Will Keen (Edgar) and Lisa Dillon (Alice) will bear comparison to any of this play’s more legendary interpreters and to any performances just now in London today. (Geoffrey Streatfeild is also first-rate in the play’s third role, Kurt.)
What Eyre and his actors have released is Strindberg’s comedy. They give us his full drama of cruel misanthropy - marriage as take-no-prisoners civil war - as something decades ahead of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in its shockingly hilarious cruelty. Alice: “He’s waking up - he looks like a troll.” Edgar, a little later: “She’s angry because I didn’t die last night.” Alice: “I’m angry because you didn’t die before I met you.” Alice, later on, explaining why she has not left Edgar: “It’s as if we’ve been welded together.” Other actors might make these and other lines merely savage, but Dillon and Keen utter them dryly, wryly, with a sarcastic humour that comes from long experience of cohabitation. It takes quite an actor to make me enjoy the word “cunt” as a term of abuse - I’m the old-fashioned kind of doctrinaire feminist in that respect - but when Dillon/Alice says “What a cunt” about Kurt, she lands the line so well that I guffawed in happy shock.
Keen’s Edgar is a military caricature come to life: dangerous, explosive, eccentric, with a brilliantly visible nervous system. He, in particular, makes us aware that this marital civil war costs him personally: there’s one point when he suffers something like a small stroke or T.I.A. - so convincingly vivid in its tics and spasms that I watched it as if experiencing it in my own body. Dillon’s way of revealing her sufferings is more oblique. As she tells Kurt/ Streatfeild that two of her children have died, she turns her head so that she makes the remark over her shoulder: this is not something to be addressed directly. Streatfeild, gazing back with his dark blue eyes at these two monsters, shows that he feels morally degraded by spending time with them.
Strindberg is controversial not just because his plays have dark veins of savagery but because some people feel his plays simply don’t work on their own terms. Eyre’s adaptation planes away some of the difficulties in Dance of Death; and his rich supply of humour makes this play come up wonderfully fresh and convincing. Here’s a production that makes Strindberg evidently the equal of his great contemporaries Ibsen and Chekhov. All praise to Eyre, Dillon, Keen, and the intimacy of the Orange Tree. No voice is amplified; every word registers; body language is superlative. How well - how characterfully - Dillon/ Alice and Keen/ Edgar dance! It’s Edgar’s dance that gives the play its title: Keen makes it brilliantly bizarre - slapping his heels and hands in ways that are like images of internal combustion.
@Alastair Macaulay 2026