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A Genteel Black Hole

Tag: play

  • Bookish Ramble: Pillars of the Community

    Ally

    Title: Pillars of the Community
    Author: Henrik Ibsen
    (Translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik)
    Year: 1877
    Country: Norway

    Format: Paperback
    Pages: 104
    Read: 29 March – 1 April 2026
    First reading

    Norwegian businessman Karsten Bernick is a well respected man about town, a pillar of the community. His shipbuilding business provides most of the jobs in his small coastal town. Plans for a new railway look set to grow his fortune even further. But his business and his public image are built on a lie. Fifteen years ago his friend Johan took the blame for a scandal that was really Karsten’s doing. In the intervening years the scandal has ballooned thanks to small-town gossip, which Karsten has turned all to his advantage. So when Johan returns from his exile in America, determined to clear his name, it looks like Karsten’s past is about to catch up with him.

    Pillars of the Community (more traditionally titled The Pillars of Society) exposes the lie that many prestigious careers are built on. Karsten is involved in insider trading—buying up cheap land, then campaigning in favour of a new railway that will vastly increase the value of said land. He’s a hypocrite, plain and simple. He uses his elevated reputation to justify his unethical actions: it’s okay if he does it, because he creates jobs for the community. The fact that the scheme will also make him unfathomably wealthy is just a happy accident. And as long as he maintains his spotless reputation, the community is bound to agree.

    Speaking up for truth is Lona, an unapologetic feminist who is famed in the town for cutting her hair short and wearing (gasp) men’s boots! She was once in love with Karsten, and loved by him, but he rejected her for a marriage of convenience that would advance his career. Lona then followed Johan to America and became his surrogate mother. She returns to Norway with Johan to become the voice of reason, to save Karsten’s soul from his own lies. Like many of Ibsen’s heroines she stands for truth, progress, emancipation, and freedom of spirit. Later he would write deeper, more well-rounded examples of this character type, but Lona is a great early example. She’s easily my favourite character in the play.

    This is the earliest of the eight Ibsen plays I’ve read so far. It deals with many of Ibsen’s recurring themes: people haunted by secrets from their past; unearned privilege; lies and hypocrisy; women’s place in modern society; the evils of capitalism; and the tension between tradition and progress. He would tackle all these topics with greater depth and nuance in later plays, but this is still a very enjoyable play in its own right. However the sudden happy ending, where Karsten undergoes a Scrooge-like metamorphosis, feels quite implausible and unearned. Overall, Pillars of the Community is an interesting and engaging play but, in my eyes, not a truly great one.

  • Bookish Ramble: Arcadia

    Ally

    Title: Arcadia
    Author: Tom Stoppard
    Year: 1993
    Country: UK

    Format: Paperback
    Pages: 128
    Read: 6 – 9 February 2026
    First reading

    Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is a dazzlingly clever play with a deeply emotional core. The setting is one room in a stately home called Sidley Park. Scenes alternate between two time periods: the early 1800s and the present. The modern scenes feature rival academics delving into Sidley Park’s history while, in the ‘period’ scenes, that very history is played out for us—often spotlighting the researchers’ misconceptions.

    The historical scenes follow Septimus Hodge, a friend of Lord Byron, as he tutors the precocious young daughter of the house, Thomasina Coverly. Thomasina’s gift for mathematics exceeds that of her tutor, or indeed any of her contemporaries, and she begins to intuit scientific theories far in advance of her era. Septimus must also dodge the wrath of visiting poet Ezra Chater, having been caught in “carnal embrace” with Mrs Chater. Meanwhile Thomasina’s mother, Lady Croom, is in talks with a landscape architect who plans to redesign the Arcadian gardens of Sidley Park in the newfangled Gothic style, complete with hermitage.

    The modern day scenes centre on the academic rivalry of Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale. Hannah is trying to uncover the identity of the mysterious Sidley Park hermit, while Bernard aims to prove his pet theory that Lord Byron fled the country after apparently killing Ezra Chater in a duel. As Hannah and Bernard research the Sidley Park archives together, aided by members of the Coverly family, unlikely relationships start to emerge.

    Thomasina: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

    My first reading barely scratched the surface of Arcadia. I loved it, but I can sense that I will love it more and understand it better when I reread it. (I had that experience recently with Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.) This is a play bristling with ideas on many subjects: History, mathematics, time, love… It’s about how much of the past is lost to us, just as our age will be to future generations. It’s an existentialist play about certain death, not of just us personally but of the universe itself; the ultimate tragedy of entropy. One day all this will be gone. But, in the end, it says we must enjoy life while we’re in it. The planets won’t keep waltzing forever but, while they are, we too must dance.