Arcadia

Product Information

Tom Stoppard's 1993 play gets richer with each viewing (...) What makes the play both moving and intriguing is that one group of characters seeks to plot the future while the other tries to reconstruct the past." - Michael Billington, The Guardian Meanwhile, Thomasina asks Septimus to teach her to dance, to prepare for her forthcoming 17th birthday party. Lady Croom enters, complaining to Noakes about the noise of his steam engine; Thomasina notes that the machine obeys the laws of entropy (which have not yet been formalized), which describe the universe as winding down. In the present, Bernard arrives and is met by Hannah, who has found a letter detailing the facts of Chater's death – this discovery totally discredits Bernard's theory and vindicates Lord Byron's reputation. While Septimus awaits appropriate music for Thomasina's dance lesson, he examines the sketch she made to illustrate the irreversibility of heat; his action mirrors that of Hannah and Valentine, who pondered the same diagram. Bernard is caught in a compromising position with Chloe, and is asked to depart. Some ideas in the play recall Goethe's novella Elective Affinities: Stoppard's characters "Thomasina" and "Septimus" have parallels in Goethe's "Ottilie" and "Eduard", and the historical section of Stoppard's play is set in 1809, the year of Goethe's novella. [33] Among other parallels, the older work takes the theory of affinity between chemical elements as a metaphor for ineluctable, inevitable "human chemistry" in the same way as Stoppard makes use of the force of determinism acting on his characters. [34] [35] A feature of both works is the preoccupation with remodelling country house landscapes; Goethe's young character "Ottilie" (the counterpart to Thomasina) dies as an indirect result of this. [33] Productions [ edit ] Poster, by James McMullan, for the Lincoln Center 1995 production Twenty-one years young, Tom Stoppard's drama of gardening and chaos theory – in which we witness events in a Derbyshire country house taking place more than a century apart – is regularly cited as one of the great plays of the last 50 years, and the playwright's undisputed masterpiece. I wouldn't dream of disagreeing: this is a play of ideas that pits the classical against the romantic, science against poetry, the past against the present. But it has a racing heart, too, exploring what it is that makes us human and our determination to keep dancing even as the darkness gathers and the universe grows cold.

Adding to the complexity an unseen Byron, who went to university with Septimus, visits Sidley Park.In 1809, Thomasina Coverly, the daughter of the house, is a precocious teenager with ideas about mathematics, nature, and physics well ahead of her time. She studies with her tutor Septimus Hodge, a friend of Lord Byron (an unseen guest in the house). In the present, writer Hannah Jarvis and literature professor Bernard Nightingale converge on the house: she is investigating a hermit who once lived on the grounds; he is researching a mysterious chapter in the life of Byron. As their studies unfold – with the help of Valentine Coverly, a post-graduate student in mathematical biology – the truth about what happened in Thomasina's time is gradually revealed. Randerson, James (2006) " Levi's memoir beats Darwin to win science book title," The Guardian, 20 October 2006, accessed 30 March 2012.

a b Canby, Vincent (31 March 1995). "Theatre Review: Arcadia; Stoppard's Comedy Of 1809 and Now". The New York Times . Retrieved 3 April 2008. Hannah becomes obsessed with a mysterious hermit who lived on the property (and, to her great satisfaction, manages to prove Bernard mistaken). Stoppard leaped on these ideas with excitement and poured them into his play. As always he relished the technical language of specialist disciplines. “Noise,” for instance, is the scientist’s word for “error,” or “observational uncertainty.” It is “what scientists blame for the inaccuracy of their measurements.” Too much noise, in Arcadia, is what drives Valentine off course in his research. In the play, “noise” becomes a metaphor for extravagant and ridiculous behavior, especially that of the fame-seeking literary don Bernard, a very noisy character. “Trivial” means, for scientists, redundant information that doesn’t lead anywhere or proofs with no value. In the play, it is a telling word for what matters and what doesn’t. Personal relationships and the achievements of individuals, says Valentine, are “trivial” compared with the search for knowledge itself. Arcadia is a highly literate, ingenious and intelligent theatrical entertainment, probably Stoppard's most accomplished play. But while one must respect the playwright's wit and erudition, it strikes me as the work of a brilliant impersonator rather than a dramatist with his own authentic voice. The play smells more of the lamp than of the musk of human experience." - Robert Brustein, The New Republic Arcadia isn’t exactly a chilly play, but it’s one where the ideas are moving, rather than the people. It’s a doleful comedy about time’s arrow, whose consolatory note is, paradoxically, reprise. "You seem quite sentimental over geometry," Bernard charges Hannah. Arcadia shows you why being sentimental over geometry might not be as silly as it sounds." - Sam Leith, Sunday TimesLabbadia isn’t alone. On the whole, Arcadia’s actors, who are undoubtedly capable of more, are painting with single colors and not bright ones. Wonder is a primary component of the play — it practically runs on the electricity of discovery, the ecstasy of poetry, the distinctively human hunger for beauty. Its other engine is humor: The scenes that take place in 1809 are, for a long time, high comedy in the Oscar Wilde vein, and the play’s modern characters are no slouches in the wit department either. These are people who say things like, “Do not dabble in paradox, Edward. It puts you in danger of fortuitous wit” and — in a single breath — “There are no more than two or three poets of the first rank now living, and I will not shoot one of them dead over a perpendicular poke in a gazebo with a woman whose reputation could not be adequately defended with a platoon of musketry deployed by rota.”