High life | 9 April 2011

New York

I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of other gems of his come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring and Marine Major Chris Meyers (retd) and their girls. Both officers saw action in Iraq, both are extremely well educated and well read, and both think that Tom Stoppard is the greatest thing since the Marine Corps. There’s nothing like Sir Tom’s intelligent wordplay and mind-boggling knowledge to put one in a great mood, until we exited the theatre, that is.

The warm glow of having witnessed something truly wonderful disappear quicker than you can say Gaddafi. Broadway is no longer the Great White Way, but a Disneyised, bustling suburban shopping mall full of megastores selling junk; a mediagenic, illuminated blur of moving electric surfaces selling more junk, with thousands of junk people gawping, eating junk food and listening to junk music blaring from their earphones. ‘Now that’s what I call romanticism versus classicism,’ I told my Marine buddies, so we decided to go downtown and get loaded.

I don’t mean to be a stickler, an aggrieved social conservative standing against youth, minorities and change, but living in the garbage culture of today does tend to make one slightly grumpy. The Marines and I wondered what a person picked at random from among the plebeian crowd would think of Arcadia — had we paid him to attend. ‘That he had landed on an another planet,’ was the collective opinion.

Mind you, we were looking at a Saturday-night crowd in Times Square, reality-show freaks being a dime a dozen, but, still, I now know why the kitchen-sink crap became so popular just as the dreadful Sixties were coming around.