The Elegant Variation: ET IN ARCADIA ...

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May 15, 2009

ET IN ARCADIA ...

It's hard to think of a place we'd rather be this wekeend than in Washington, D.C., enjoying the Folger revival of Tom Stoppard's masterpiece, Arcadia.

So what you're served on this evening is a lavishly overflowing platter of the playwright's talents for finding connectivity in, well, everything: Newtonian physics, Byronic poetry, academic charlatanism, the designs of English gardens, the sexual awakening of a teenage girl, Fermat's theorems. Whether you know a single thing about Pierre de Fermat, a father of modern calculus, without first typing in his name on Wikipedia proves irrelevant. Stoppard is laying out these narrative landmarks in service of a larger purpose, of illuminating the poignant, illogical precision of human progress.

Elsewhere, Sir Tom sits down for a long conversation with the Financial Times, as he prepares to bring Arcadia back to the London stage.

The thought of these “Arcadia children” (though it’s perhaps a skittish ruse for getting round my question) brings us to his actor son. Ed Stoppard is the youngest of his four sons – his mother is Dr Miriam Stoppard, the playwright’s second wife – and takes the part of Valentine Coverley in the new Arcadia. Does this cause any difficulties?

“He was such an obvious person to be on the shortlist for the role” – Ed already has a well-received Hamlet among his other West End credits – “but at first I thought, ‘Perhaps he shouldn’t’, then I thought, ‘The hell with it, he shouldn’t be penalised for carrying my name.’ I stayed away from his auditions, of course – but now I’m rehearsing with him I don’t even think of him as being my Ed, he’s just another actor. And he’s got three little girls, so I’m just glad he’s got a job.”

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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