Alan Titchmarsh in Arcadia
If we are being strictly honest, Alan Titchmarsh does not appear in 'Arcadia' but Richard Noakes, nineteenth century landscape gardener, does. Lady Croom has asked him to redesign the grounds of Sidley Park, her large country house and he gets going with unstoppable enthusiasm. Unfortunately, his work is based on artistic ideas quite alien to his employer. According to Thomasina, "Mr Noakes's scheme for the garden is perfect. It is a Salvator!"
Salvator Rosa
Salvator Rosa born in 1615 in the outskirts of Naples, southern Italy. His father wanted him to become a priest or a lawyer. However, he preferred to visit his uncles to learn how to paint. He used to paint in solitude, going to the coast and caverns and this was why he became interested in painting romantic and wild landscapes. Rosa went to Rome many times, until one of the Medici family called him to go to Florence, where he later married his wife, Lucrezia, and had two sons. Rosa was a great artist whose depictions of the romantic and the picturesque have great energy and a certain grandeur. Some of his work can be seen in the National Gallery, London.
Salvator Rossi: Landscape with Tobias and the Angel
Bringing God up to Date
However, Noakes's scheme for Lady Croom's garden is not a great success. As Lady Croom herself puts it: "My lake is drained to a ditch for no purpose I can understand, unless it be that snipe and curlew have deserted three counties so that they may be shot in our swamp. What you painted as forest is mean plantation, your greenery is mud, your waterfall is wet mud, and your mount is an opencast mine for the mud that was lacking in the dell."
For Hannah Jarvis, the twentieth-century garden historian who is researching the landscape history of Sidley Park, Lady Croom's misfortune provides her with the perfect symbol: "There's an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760 everything had gone - the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes - the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown. The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God's countryside. And then Richard Noakes came in to bring God up to date. By the time he finished it looked like this. The decline from thinking to feeling, you see."
Thinking and Feeling
The history of the Sidley Park garden, in other words, is not merely of academic interest. It is of vital importance to several of the characters and, what is more, what happens to the garden is reflected in the lives and loves of the Arcadian characters. Hannah and Septimus, in their very different ways, base their lives on the supremacy of thinking over feeling and yet their heady rationality is ploughed under by straightforward hearty emotion. It is not the emotional characters who dance on stage or go mad in this play.
Stoppard does not allow the gardening debate to lurk in a corner of the play: it is further dramatised in the discussion of scientific ideas: cool, rational Newtonian Physics being superseded by the unbridled emotion of Chaos Theory. At least that's one, admittedly not terribly scientific, way of seeing it. What is indubitable is that the garden is always there in the background, but not because it is of peripheral interest. The ways in which the characters attempt to shape Arcadia and the ways in which it shapes them are central to the message of this fascinating play.