Arcadia Review: Flaming Hot and Room Temperature

Arcadia, co-directed by Aidan Monks and Millie Chew, is a play about heat. Specifically, it’s about how heat, contrary to Newton’s backwards and forwards laws of motion, can only flow in one direction: hot to cold. This is the second law of thermodynamics, a law whose full explanation is well outside the scope of a student theatre review but is nonetheless central, both narratively and thematically, to Arcadia. I’m not much of a STEM guy myself, but I went into Arcadia cautiously optimistic that even with all the potential scientific jargon a play about thermodynamics could possibly entail, I would still be able to immerse myself in the story and leave the theatre intellectually enriched. 

My optimism was rewarded for the first few scenes. I was immediately impressed by the immaculate set design (courtesy of director Aidan Monks), with paintings and equation-filled chalkboards dangling over a sparse yet elegant garden-front room. This was complimented by the lighting and sound work, done by Willa Meloth and Annalise Roberts respectively, which, while subtle, helped reinforce the atmosphere. Even though the room hardly changed as the play jumped between the nineteenth century past and twentieth century “present”, I felt a real sense of the transition from order to disorder, from hot to cold. 

The performances in these opening scenes also offered me much to be impressed by. Dylan Swain is instantly believable as tutor Septimus Hodge, delivering his lines with serious charm and wit as he tries to balance tutoring the precocious Thomasina Coverly with avoiding (true) allegations of a “carnal embrace” between himself and a married woman. This performance, along with his performance in Aidan Monks’ previous play Closer, highlight what a remarkable talent Swain is, and I look forward to seeing what he does next. 

Aubrey McCance and Lexie Dykes are the driving force of the modern storyline, perfectly balancing each other and making their duologues very engaging. McCance plays eccentric academic Bernard Nightingale with a wonderful swagger, dancing around the stage as he delivers his lines with a deliberately farcical cadence that repeatedly got a laugh out of me. Dykes, on the other hand, plays the far more reserved author Hannah Jarvis, with her stony demeanour and begrudging interest in Nightingale’s theories being a delight to watch. 

Unfortunately, two performances stood out as just a bit too scenery-chewing for my taste: Geordie Coles as poet Ezra Chater and Luke Robinson as Captain Edward Brice. While some of their over-the-top delivery and physicality got a chuckle out of me, it often strayed too far into the ridiculous and undermined my immersion in the story. I certainly wouldn’t call the performances bad; I only wish they had been toned down a little so as not to weaken an otherwise great batch of opening scenes.

Past these scenes, however, something started to go amiss. Small moments, such as an instance of a door being left open on stage and a moment where a sound queue was played very loudly, felt more like mistakes than creative choices and compounded over the course of the play, harming my immersion. As the story began to lose some steam and the plot grew less compelling, the loss of immersion was difficult to ignore. Ironically, by the end of its runtime, Arcadia found itself the victim of the very force it was written about: entropy. The story lost its heat as the play drew to a close and became, as Valentine Coverly predicts of the universe, room temperature.

Even given some minor yet distracting creative choices and the story issues, I think director Aidan Monks’ creative vision and some really excellent performances make Arcadia something worth checking out. If nothing else, you’ll still learn a fair bit about thermodynamics, and you can’t really say that about any other production out currently. I would make another heat pun to end this article, but I fear my inspiration has gone cold, so I’ll just say: give Arcadia a shot. 

Photos by Felix Saint-Bris