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Tom Stoppard's Arcardia


Shayune

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I recently got the part of Hannah Jarvis in a local production of Arcadia. If you haven't read it, it's a pretty interesting play. It all takes place in the same room of one house, but it switches back and forth between 1809 and the modern day. The modern characters are researching the history of the house, and trying to understand exactly what was going on in 1809. After they discuss it for a while (many of them are historians) you switch back to 1809 and see what really happened. It's a lot more complicated than that, but I don't want to spoil it if you haven't read it.

Anyway, long story short, my part - Hannah Jarvis - is one of the historians researching the house in the modern day. During the course of the play, all three men who are present in the house with her proposition her in various ways. The first is a man named Valentine, who constantly claims that she is his fianceƩ. He seems fairly serious about it, but she insists that it's just a joke. Another man is Gus, who is actually more of a boy. He's a mute fifteen-year-old with a crush who Hannah humors by dancing with him once. Here's an interesting exchange between Hannah and a rival historian, Bernard:

BERNARD: Why don't you come?

HANNAH: Where?

BERNARD: With me.

HANNAH: To London? What for?

BERNARD: What for.

HANNAH: Oh, your lecture.

BERNARD: No, no, bugger that. Sex.

HANNAH: Oh.... No thanks.... (Then protesting) Bernard!

BERNARD: You should try it. It's very underrated.

HANNAH: Nothing against it.

BERNARD: Yes you have. You should let yourself go a bit. You might have written a better book. Or at any rate the right book.

HANNAH: Sex and literature. Literature and sex. Your conversation, let to itself, doesn't have many places to go. Like two marbles rolling around a pudding basin. One of them is always sex.

There's a whole lot more throughout the play, but this is the best part. It's her view on marriage:

HANNAH: I don't know a worse bargain. Available sex against not being allowed to fart in bed.

A lot of people playing this part have interpreted Hannah as a repressed woman who has been too hurt by her past (which is never described or even mentioned by the character) to allow herself to love again. People think she just doesn't know who she is, and other such nonsense. But I'm going to play her as a confident person who knows exactly who she is: a smart, history-obsessed writer who happens to be asexual.

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It is also a typical cultural response to people who have no interest in sex.

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