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Arcadia
In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the '500 acres inclusive of lake' where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the 'picturesque' Gothic 'everything but vampires', as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later.Bernard has arrived to uncover the scandal which is said to have taken place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park.Tom Stoppard's absorbing play takes us back and forth between the centuries and explores the nature of truth and time, the difference between the Classical and the Romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life - 'the attraction', as Hannah says, 'which Newton left out'.
115 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1993
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About the author
Tom Stoppard
160 books986 followersSir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,337 reviews
February 16, 2013
Enough people love this play that it presumably has some good qualities. But I just couldn't get past the snide, obnoxious characters, and the facile, frequently inaccurate treatment of science and math, which panders to the "science is just the product of fallible human impulses and, like, we don't really know anything for sure anyway, man" attitude that has become the norm among intellectuals and wannabe intellectuals who, for one reason or another, aren't interested in science.
As a presentation of math and science to a lay audience, the play is a failure. It feels as though Stoppard read James Gleick's Chaos (or a similar popular text), misunderstood it, forgot half of it, and then wrote the play on this basis of what remained. When Stoppard tries to write about chaos theory, he fails to mention the central concept -- sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the famous "butterfly effect") and its appearance even in simple systems -- and instead only tells the audience that chaos has something to do with iterated maps.
He mentions that iterated maps can produce fractals that look very much like realistic mountains, leaves, ferns, etc., and implies that the failure of 18th/19th-century dreams of predictability has something to do with the failure to use these realistic, fractal models of objects in physics calculations. (One of the characters proleptically quotes Mandlebrot: "Mountains are not cones, clouds are not spheres.") This, of course, raises the question: if we do have fractals now, is predictability no longer doomed? The answer is no, because (almost) all interesting physical systems exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions; but Stoppard does not clarify this. An audience member unfamiliar with the material will leave the play under the impression that physicists like Newton and Laplace were overly optimistic about prediction because they did not know about iterated maps, which (somehow!) are supposed to make prediction harder. Since the idea of an iterated map is very simple (indeed, it is explained in the play), this makes these geniuses look rather stupid.
Of course, they actually did know about iterated maps. (One of the most famous iterated maps is called . . . wait for it . . . Newton's method.) They didn't appreciate the unpredictability of very simple systems, but that unpredictability is a subtle issue, and Stoppard's play doesn't begin to get into it.
There are other errors, too, and they too (uncoincidentally) serve to make early physicists look dumb or oblivious. For instance, at one point one of the characters -- Thomasina, a precocious child who is learning physics -- reads a paper which, given the date and the description of its content, must be Fourier's paper on the heat equation. This paper is famous for introducing Fourier series, but Thomasina seems to think it is remarkable for another reason. She exclaims that Fourier's equations are "not like Newton's equations," for they specify a direction of time, while "Newton's equations" are reversible. This claim comes as quite a surprise, since the heat equation studied by Fourier is simply a continuous version of an equation called . . . wait for it . . . Newton's Law of Cooling. Presumably by "Newton's equations" Thomasina specifically means Newton's three laws of motion. But even there, she's wrong: although in some special cases Newton's laws are reversible, they can also describe irreversible forces, and indeed Newton himself believed that the most fundamental forces were likely to be irreversible. (This would explain the fact that many real-life phenomena, like stirring milk into coffee, seem to be irreversible -- another case where Stoppard seems to imply that early physicists simply ignored something obvious.)
The play views the march of science with an amused sneer: oh, look at these funny plodding people, convinced that they know so much, yet battered this way and that by their culture, swelling with utopian ambition in the Enlightenment, inventing lurid tales of heat death in the age of Romanticism, and once the 20th century rolls around they create "jazzy" math and lose faith in the old verities . . . Now, I'm not denying that scientists are fallible human beings, but Stoppard's sneer is unearned. The issues involved in the development of theoretical physics are esoteric, irreducibly mathematical, and mind-bendingly subtle. This is serious shit. Really, really smart people have been working very, very hard on it for centuries. I'm sure that Stoppard and some parts of his audience would like to imagine themselves as Thomasina, instantly spotting the errors of those grim old scientists and dispatching them with a light, witty touch. Would that that were possible! But science is really hard; when our predecessors have made mistakes they tend to be subtle, recondite ones. Try to catch the masters making obvious blunders and you will just fall on your face, as Stoppard has done.
And Thomasina gripes about having to plot simple mathematical curves like parabolas, because they don't look like real natural forms. Never mind that simple curves are tremendously important in science anyway. Never mind that facts like this are precious and remarkable precisely because they are surprising; if science always conformed to our intuitions (about, say, which shapes are important) it wouldn't have much value. No, Tom Stoppard's audience just remembers its own confusion and displeasure over math in high school and would like its prejudices confirmed. Maybe all those funny curves we had to draw as children really were meaningless! Take that, school! Now let's go home from the theater and never think about math again.
(Also: love/sex is "the attraction that Newton left out"? Seriously??? I know it's just a joke but it's an awful, cringe-inducingly cutesy one. I have a high cutesiness tolerance and this play is too much even for me.)
As a presentation of math and science to a lay audience, the play is a failure. It feels as though Stoppard read James Gleick's Chaos (or a similar popular text), misunderstood it, forgot half of it, and then wrote the play on this basis of what remained. When Stoppard tries to write about chaos theory, he fails to mention the central concept -- sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the famous "butterfly effect") and its appearance even in simple systems -- and instead only tells the audience that chaos has something to do with iterated maps.
He mentions that iterated maps can produce fractals that look very much like realistic mountains, leaves, ferns, etc., and implies that the failure of 18th/19th-century dreams of predictability has something to do with the failure to use these realistic, fractal models of objects in physics calculations. (One of the characters proleptically quotes Mandlebrot: "Mountains are not cones, clouds are not spheres.") This, of course, raises the question: if we do have fractals now, is predictability no longer doomed? The answer is no, because (almost) all interesting physical systems exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions; but Stoppard does not clarify this. An audience member unfamiliar with the material will leave the play under the impression that physicists like Newton and Laplace were overly optimistic about prediction because they did not know about iterated maps, which (somehow!) are supposed to make prediction harder. Since the idea of an iterated map is very simple (indeed, it is explained in the play), this makes these geniuses look rather stupid.
Of course, they actually did know about iterated maps. (One of the most famous iterated maps is called . . . wait for it . . . Newton's method.) They didn't appreciate the unpredictability of very simple systems, but that unpredictability is a subtle issue, and Stoppard's play doesn't begin to get into it.
There are other errors, too, and they too (uncoincidentally) serve to make early physicists look dumb or oblivious. For instance, at one point one of the characters -- Thomasina, a precocious child who is learning physics -- reads a paper which, given the date and the description of its content, must be Fourier's paper on the heat equation. This paper is famous for introducing Fourier series, but Thomasina seems to think it is remarkable for another reason. She exclaims that Fourier's equations are "not like Newton's equations," for they specify a direction of time, while "Newton's equations" are reversible. This claim comes as quite a surprise, since the heat equation studied by Fourier is simply a continuous version of an equation called . . . wait for it . . . Newton's Law of Cooling. Presumably by "Newton's equations" Thomasina specifically means Newton's three laws of motion. But even there, she's wrong: although in some special cases Newton's laws are reversible, they can also describe irreversible forces, and indeed Newton himself believed that the most fundamental forces were likely to be irreversible. (This would explain the fact that many real-life phenomena, like stirring milk into coffee, seem to be irreversible -- another case where Stoppard seems to imply that early physicists simply ignored something obvious.)
The play views the march of science with an amused sneer: oh, look at these funny plodding people, convinced that they know so much, yet battered this way and that by their culture, swelling with utopian ambition in the Enlightenment, inventing lurid tales of heat death in the age of Romanticism, and once the 20th century rolls around they create "jazzy" math and lose faith in the old verities . . . Now, I'm not denying that scientists are fallible human beings, but Stoppard's sneer is unearned. The issues involved in the development of theoretical physics are esoteric, irreducibly mathematical, and mind-bendingly subtle. This is serious shit. Really, really smart people have been working very, very hard on it for centuries. I'm sure that Stoppard and some parts of his audience would like to imagine themselves as Thomasina, instantly spotting the errors of those grim old scientists and dispatching them with a light, witty touch. Would that that were possible! But science is really hard; when our predecessors have made mistakes they tend to be subtle, recondite ones. Try to catch the masters making obvious blunders and you will just fall on your face, as Stoppard has done.
And Thomasina gripes about having to plot simple mathematical curves like parabolas, because they don't look like real natural forms. Never mind that simple curves are tremendously important in science anyway. Never mind that facts like this are precious and remarkable precisely because they are surprising; if science always conformed to our intuitions (about, say, which shapes are important) it wouldn't have much value. No, Tom Stoppard's audience just remembers its own confusion and displeasure over math in high school and would like its prejudices confirmed. Maybe all those funny curves we had to draw as children really were meaningless! Take that, school! Now let's go home from the theater and never think about math again.
(Also: love/sex is "the attraction that Newton left out"? Seriously??? I know it's just a joke but it's an awful, cringe-inducingly cutesy one. I have a high cutesiness tolerance and this play is too much even for me.)
May 26, 2009
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 4, 2018
The Waltz of Time
Reading Iain Pears' brilliant novel Arcadia just now, I wondered how it might have been influenced by Tom Stoppard's 1993 play of the same title, which has been described [in the article I shall cite below] as "maybe the greatest play of our age." Answer: very much, and yet hardly at all. Stoppard casts his play of ideas as a drawing-room comedy—or rather two comedies alternating in the same room, the one beginning in 1809, the other in 1990. Pears infuses his ideas into a melange of fantasy, sci-fi, and dystopian fiction, with a few other genres thrown in. But many of them are the same ideas as Stoppard’s: principally, the notion that the past and future are inextricably connected, and that science may be simultaneously our prison and our key to escape.
Among the many ideas and images in this play, two in particular stand out. One is symbolized by the changes wrought in the gardens of Sidley Park between 1809 and 1812. What had been a carefully constructed Arcadian landscape of classical balance is turned into a romantic fantasy. "Where there [was] the pastoral refinement of an Englishman's garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was never spring nor a stone." Order versus passion, facts versus feeling, the aesthetic dilemma of the late 18th century, and I suppose our own.
Stoppard's parallel image is mathematical. Thomasina Coverly, the heroine of the earlier period, a teenage genius, is being taught scientific principles by her young tutor, Septimus Hodge, along classical Newtonian lines. But she has two insights. One is to recognize that where most equations are reversible, those of thermodynamics are not: heat will always give way to cold. In other words, math as the calculus of our inevitable demise. The other is the realization that mathematics need not deal only with the perfection of man-made objects, but can describe the random properties of nature as well. She does not not have the computing power to develop her instinctive algorithm, but another Coverly descendant 180 years later, using a laptop computer, can do so easily: it is called chaos theory.
In preparing for this review, I read an article by Johann Hari from the Independent of Thursday 21 May 2009. It is a brilliant and comprehensive piece that I recommend to everyone, but which has left me with little to say of my own. Except to quote Hari's last paragraph, describing the ending of the play, when characters from the two centuries stumble onstage together. "It's a moment that shows the power of the play of ideas to fuse together concepts and characters into a theatrical grenade. This final scene is the waltz that takes place inside all of us -- of our ancestors dancing with our present, of reason dancing with irrationality, and of hope dancing with despair, as the roaring, crackling sound of the heat-death draws ever closer." The rest of the article is that good; the play is even better.
======
Plays are meant to be seen on the stage, so why read them on paper? It's easier for me, I suppose, because I am a director by profession, and scripts are our raw material, like reading the score rather than attending the concert. You can play it out in your own time. You can pause to savor witty lines like "As her tutor, you have a duty to keep her in ignorance." You can feel the genuine emotion welling up through all the clever wordplay. And, an unexpected bonus, you can revel in Stoppard's delightfully off-hand stage directions: "He takes a chair. She remains standing. Possibly she smokes; if so, perhaps now. A short cigarette-holder sounds right, too. Or brown-paper cigarillos." Tom Stoppard in friendly conversation with his director, Trevor Nunn, quite willing to leave such details to him. But where it matters, in his control of characters and ideas, his touch is masterly. A great, great play.
Reading Iain Pears' brilliant novel Arcadia just now, I wondered how it might have been influenced by Tom Stoppard's 1993 play of the same title, which has been described [in the article I shall cite below] as "maybe the greatest play of our age." Answer: very much, and yet hardly at all. Stoppard casts his play of ideas as a drawing-room comedy—or rather two comedies alternating in the same room, the one beginning in 1809, the other in 1990. Pears infuses his ideas into a melange of fantasy, sci-fi, and dystopian fiction, with a few other genres thrown in. But many of them are the same ideas as Stoppard’s: principally, the notion that the past and future are inextricably connected, and that science may be simultaneously our prison and our key to escape.
Among the many ideas and images in this play, two in particular stand out. One is symbolized by the changes wrought in the gardens of Sidley Park between 1809 and 1812. What had been a carefully constructed Arcadian landscape of classical balance is turned into a romantic fantasy. "Where there [was] the pastoral refinement of an Englishman's garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was never spring nor a stone." Order versus passion, facts versus feeling, the aesthetic dilemma of the late 18th century, and I suppose our own.
Stoppard's parallel image is mathematical. Thomasina Coverly, the heroine of the earlier period, a teenage genius, is being taught scientific principles by her young tutor, Septimus Hodge, along classical Newtonian lines. But she has two insights. One is to recognize that where most equations are reversible, those of thermodynamics are not: heat will always give way to cold. In other words, math as the calculus of our inevitable demise. The other is the realization that mathematics need not deal only with the perfection of man-made objects, but can describe the random properties of nature as well. She does not not have the computing power to develop her instinctive algorithm, but another Coverly descendant 180 years later, using a laptop computer, can do so easily: it is called chaos theory.
In preparing for this review, I read an article by Johann Hari from the Independent of Thursday 21 May 2009. It is a brilliant and comprehensive piece that I recommend to everyone, but which has left me with little to say of my own. Except to quote Hari's last paragraph, describing the ending of the play, when characters from the two centuries stumble onstage together. "It's a moment that shows the power of the play of ideas to fuse together concepts and characters into a theatrical grenade. This final scene is the waltz that takes place inside all of us -- of our ancestors dancing with our present, of reason dancing with irrationality, and of hope dancing with despair, as the roaring, crackling sound of the heat-death draws ever closer." The rest of the article is that good; the play is even better.
======
Plays are meant to be seen on the stage, so why read them on paper? It's easier for me, I suppose, because I am a director by profession, and scripts are our raw material, like reading the score rather than attending the concert. You can play it out in your own time. You can pause to savor witty lines like "As her tutor, you have a duty to keep her in ignorance." You can feel the genuine emotion welling up through all the clever wordplay. And, an unexpected bonus, you can revel in Stoppard's delightfully off-hand stage directions: "He takes a chair. She remains standing. Possibly she smokes; if so, perhaps now. A short cigarette-holder sounds right, too. Or brown-paper cigarillos." Tom Stoppard in friendly conversation with his director, Trevor Nunn, quite willing to leave such details to him. But where it matters, in his control of characters and ideas, his touch is masterly. A great, great play.
July 26, 2020
Probably the most ambitious play (1993) from Tom Stoppard, taking place in one setting tacking back and forth between two centuries. The basic focus is on the relationship between science and art, between the rational and romantic, about chaos theory, and sex! It's erudite, drawing on scholarly sources from a variety of disciplines, and is also down to earth funny, with bad puns abounding. Women scientists and mathematicians take center stage in each period. I have never seen it performed, and I am sure would have preferred experiencing it that way, but I enjoyed the LA Theater Works production and the conversation with a mathematician about chaos theory that followed it. It was good to slow down and listen again to passages with ideas I just was not quite following. That's the virtue of reading it or listening to it. But if are skeptical about the usefulness of science, read this play! And if you love language, read any Stoppard.
February 9, 2015
I first encountered this play my freshman year of college, and here I am in my final semester, reading it once more. If you have read this play yourself, you might see the beauty and significance in that duality. Nevertheless, I adore this play so, so much. Tom Stoppard is a complete genuis.
The play follows two time periods, the early 1800's and a contemporary setting, both in the same exact location, an English manor house. In the 1800's we observe Thomasina, a 13 year old intellectual, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. They're both quick-witted and banter throughout the play which is wonderful. In the present day we follow some descendants of the manor house's family, Chloe, Gus, and Valentine, as two scholars, Hannah and Bernard, are researching information about the people who lived and visited the manor in the 1800's.
Stoppard plays with the convention of having the set stay the same throughout the play, no matter the time period, as well as the accumulation of objects from both periods on the table in the center of the stage. It addresses themes of relationships, time and entropy, and arts and sciences. All good things at the center of a really good play.
Of course plays are mostly meant to be seen and not read, but if you are going to read any play, I really recommend this one. It's one that has heavily influenced my thinking and my approach to drama, and one that will stick with me for a long time.
The play follows two time periods, the early 1800's and a contemporary setting, both in the same exact location, an English manor house. In the 1800's we observe Thomasina, a 13 year old intellectual, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. They're both quick-witted and banter throughout the play which is wonderful. In the present day we follow some descendants of the manor house's family, Chloe, Gus, and Valentine, as two scholars, Hannah and Bernard, are researching information about the people who lived and visited the manor in the 1800's.
Stoppard plays with the convention of having the set stay the same throughout the play, no matter the time period, as well as the accumulation of objects from both periods on the table in the center of the stage. It addresses themes of relationships, time and entropy, and arts and sciences. All good things at the center of a really good play.
Of course plays are mostly meant to be seen and not read, but if you are going to read any play, I really recommend this one. It's one that has heavily influenced my thinking and my approach to drama, and one that will stick with me for a long time.
October 15, 2021
“Let's danse…”
A very ingenious play, chock full of themes and references to scientific and cultural-historical phenomena. The central theme is, of course, the apparent contradiction between chaos and order, which turns out to be none. Also past and future, Enlightenment and Romanticism, love and hate do not appear to be separate extremes, but rather very complex interrelated phenomena. By playing on 2 fields, in two different time periods (early 19th and late 20th century), Stoppard manages to create a dynamic that continues to intrigue. After 1 reading you have barely reckognized a handful of the references. Naturally, this makes this comedy primarily an intellectual experiment, the moral of which is that chaos also has an underlying order. With the final scene, in which the protagonists in the two time periods dance with each other, Stoppard seems to shake off all the heavy-handed theories, as if he is sticking his tongue out at the reader/spectator. Again, ingeniously done, but whether it is also a successful play on stage seems to me to be a completely different question.
A very ingenious play, chock full of themes and references to scientific and cultural-historical phenomena. The central theme is, of course, the apparent contradiction between chaos and order, which turns out to be none. Also past and future, Enlightenment and Romanticism, love and hate do not appear to be separate extremes, but rather very complex interrelated phenomena. By playing on 2 fields, in two different time periods (early 19th and late 20th century), Stoppard manages to create a dynamic that continues to intrigue. After 1 reading you have barely reckognized a handful of the references. Naturally, this makes this comedy primarily an intellectual experiment, the moral of which is that chaos also has an underlying order. With the final scene, in which the protagonists in the two time periods dance with each other, Stoppard seems to shake off all the heavy-handed theories, as if he is sticking his tongue out at the reader/spectator. Again, ingeniously done, but whether it is also a successful play on stage seems to me to be a completely different question.
June 29, 2024
This is another wonderful play by Stoppard. This story takes place in two separate time periods, many decades distant from each other, and the events in the earlier period are being studied and referenced by the characters in the latter.
The play captures the often violent dance of art and science, beautifully arranged in waltz time. It delves into chaos theory and questions how much our knowledge is limited by the time we have and the speed at which we can process information. It asks the question 'what is trivial and what is important' and may cause you to re-examine your previous opinions on the matter (it certainly had me looking at things in a new light). There's even a love story tucked away in amongst all the brain-wrenching bits, so that's nice.
Being a Stoppard play, it is obviously very clever and full of wordplay (OK, and some quite groan-worthy puns, but I'm a sucker for a good pun).
Most importantly of all, there are two tortoises... or is it the same tortoise? Or is it, dare I say it, tortoises all the way down?
The play captures the often violent dance of art and science, beautifully arranged in waltz time. It delves into chaos theory and questions how much our knowledge is limited by the time we have and the speed at which we can process information. It asks the question 'what is trivial and what is important' and may cause you to re-examine your previous opinions on the matter (it certainly had me looking at things in a new light). There's even a love story tucked away in amongst all the brain-wrenching bits, so that's nice.
Being a Stoppard play, it is obviously very clever and full of wordplay (OK, and some quite groan-worthy puns, but I'm a sucker for a good pun).
Most importantly of all, there are two tortoises... or is it the same tortoise? Or is it, dare I say it, tortoises all the way down?
April 11, 2020
Tom Stoppard does it again. What 'it' is, is a different question.
Within this play, love and intellectualism work in opposition. It is in essence a play about how we may know everything there is to know but we cannot only know this: we must also know what it is to love. We can predict the future, Stoppard believes; except, of course, for irregularities, like sex. The play focuses a lot on sex in this regard, to the point where questionable choices are made. (Pairing a 17-year-old with her 25-year-old-tutor who has known her since she was 13 is simply... not a choice I would have made.) I also didn't fully believe the 'love' between either of the couples: I believed they were attracted to each other, but not that they loved each other. The final waltz is a wonderful scene, but some of the buildup felt like not enough.
Discovery of work after a time... that, I had more emotions about. When Thomasina questions why
Septimus tells her that their lost plays will be "discovered, or otherwise reproduced".
I also love the costume blending and prop listing. This particularly would work well onstage.
I dramatically read this with my friends over Zoom and would love to give it a detailed reread at some point. Tom Stoppard has the oddest style and I can never decide if I like it. I did like this more than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. That, however, may be because I desperately miss the people I got to see. Lockdown is killing me a bit.
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Within this play, love and intellectualism work in opposition. It is in essence a play about how we may know everything there is to know but we cannot only know this: we must also know what it is to love. We can predict the future, Stoppard believes; except, of course, for irregularities, like sex. The play focuses a lot on sex in this regard, to the point where questionable choices are made. (Pairing a 17-year-old with her 25-year-old-tutor who has known her since she was 13 is simply... not a choice I would have made.) I also didn't fully believe the 'love' between either of the couples: I believed they were attracted to each other, but not that they loved each other. The final waltz is a wonderful scene, but some of the buildup felt like not enough.
Discovery of work after a time... that, I had more emotions about. When Thomasina questions why
Septimus tells her that their lost plays will be "discovered, or otherwise reproduced".
I also love the costume blending and prop listing. This particularly would work well onstage.
I dramatically read this with my friends over Zoom and would love to give it a detailed reread at some point. Tom Stoppard has the oddest style and I can never decide if I like it. I did like this more than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. That, however, may be because I desperately miss the people I got to see. Lockdown is killing me a bit.
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May 7, 2020
(See full sized image here)
THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?
SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
God, I wish I'd written this.
Science and literature are not exclusive; they are, in many ways, compatible. Arcadia is an exhilarating study of how lives across time intersect on scientific, literary and romantic planes - and how it's all destined to dissolve into chaos, converging in a travesty. It is a play of breathtaking scope, structure and intelligence, and the ensemble is hilarious. (Don't believe me? Here are some of the highlights. But can I just clarify that they've neglected to include the funniest bits - probably something to do with keeping it PG.)
A blisteringly clever tearjerker with fantastic characters (including a fictional avatar of Ada Lovelace, hence the nod to Kate Beaton's cartoons) and a relatively simple but brilliant premise: the inhabitants of Sidley Park in the 20th century are trying to figure out what exactly happened to the inhabitants from the 19th century when Lord Byron came to stay...
I waited far, far too long for a re-read. This is a story that has greatly informed my views and interests on a number of levels, and still has me crying with laughter.
February 12, 2021
A bit over my head in one sense -- some angle about Isaac Newton and determinism and all the science and math that entails (science and math being my Scylla & Charybdis).
Other than that, a technically difficult accomplishment in that Stoppard runs simultaneous plots in the same room from 1809 to the present day. Some fuss about Lord Byron being in a duel that gunned down a sub-par poet (trying to clear them out, maybe, their number being legion).
Anyway, Stoppard manages to bring the parallel plots together and, even more impressive, does so with a lot of witty repartee between the characters both then and now. Sorry, but no Lord Byron lines. He's only spoken of, not allowed to speak. And, as you might guess, sexual undercurrents disrupt Newtonian currents in both epochs.
With man- and womankind, you can always count on that.
Other than that, a technically difficult accomplishment in that Stoppard runs simultaneous plots in the same room from 1809 to the present day. Some fuss about Lord Byron being in a duel that gunned down a sub-par poet (trying to clear them out, maybe, their number being legion).
Anyway, Stoppard manages to bring the parallel plots together and, even more impressive, does so with a lot of witty repartee between the characters both then and now. Sorry, but no Lord Byron lines. He's only spoken of, not allowed to speak. And, as you might guess, sexual undercurrents disrupt Newtonian currents in both epochs.
With man- and womankind, you can always count on that.
November 29, 2023
”We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms. What we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long, and life is very short. We die on the march, but there’s nothing outside the march, so nothing can be lost to it.”
Arcadia is a gloriously convoluted play, where garden architecture, botany, math, literature, and chaos theory romp across one English manor, two centuries, and the paired casts of eccentric characters that are both separated and connected by those centuries. Enlightenment and Romanticism clash, couples copulate, satisfaction is demanded, and farce, irony, and pathos chase each other across the stage. It is a play only Tom Stoppard could have written.
Stoppard’s wizardry with words sends the witticisms jostling the profundities, crowding the ironies until you are nearly overwhelmed with the virtuosity of his verbosity. He continues this relentlessly until finally literally waltzing us out in the final scene.
Damn! I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats.
Arcadia is a gloriously convoluted play, where garden architecture, botany, math, literature, and chaos theory romp across one English manor, two centuries, and the paired casts of eccentric characters that are both separated and connected by those centuries. Enlightenment and Romanticism clash, couples copulate, satisfaction is demanded, and farce, irony, and pathos chase each other across the stage. It is a play only Tom Stoppard could have written.
Stoppard’s wizardry with words sends the witticisms jostling the profundities, crowding the ironies until you are nearly overwhelmed with the virtuosity of his verbosity. He continues this relentlessly until finally literally waltzing us out in the final scene.
Damn! I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats.
November 29, 2015
Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Stellar writing, just a spot under-fed. I would've appreciated more bulk, more fury -- some Sturm und Drang . Alas a two-tiered production featuring landed aristocracy, precocious children and the ribald aura of Lord Byron. Ruminating over these historical effects almost 200 years later in the same room are a rasher of academics, including a physicist. There are some stunning lines here. I simply wanted more.
Stellar writing, just a spot under-fed. I would've appreciated more bulk, more fury -- some Sturm und Drang . Alas a two-tiered production featuring landed aristocracy, precocious children and the ribald aura of Lord Byron. Ruminating over these historical effects almost 200 years later in the same room are a rasher of academics, including a physicist. There are some stunning lines here. I simply wanted more.
October 20, 2022
(have reread, rating and review stand Strong; I've accidentally started rereading it on the exact same day I've first read it three years ago, which is nothing short of Appropriate.)
***
I have an endless stream of thoughts regarding Arcadia, but I don’t know in what way I can connect them in a coherent block of text. I know my views; I just don’t know how to express them when it comes to some writings I adore. From thinking to feeling. Yes, I adore this Play.
I adore Tom Stoppard.
To begin with, I don’t usually read plays. I haven’t the patience nor command of patience for them. It all stems from school (of course), from being forced to read plays I could not and would not relate to and then having to sing the playwright’s praises as being my country’s “best and brightest”, even though realistically, the man would be a bore.
"Your tea gets cold by itself but it doesn’t get hot by itself, do you think that’s odd?"
Oh. Oh dear...
Tom Stoppard is no bore.
Arcadia is a labyrinth of algebra and literature, sexual affairs and physics, Classicism and Romanticism, Nineteenth and Twentieth century. Amusing beyond measure, mournful, erudite and written with such commendable style, it succeeds in its copulation of simplicity and complexity without being pretentious or gaudy.
Against the backdrop of a common re-landscaping of a manor house, the stage is set representing the intellectual shift that was sweeping over the world at that time.
"It's what happened to the Enlightenment, isn't it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and fake beauty... The decline from thinking to feeling, you see."
It's the old division that obsessed the 18th century. The classical order – which mutated into the Enlightenment – believed the world was ordered and was governed by rules that could be slowly uncovered. The Romantics believed this was a suffocating cage in which humanity was imprisoned, and sought to overthrow all rules in the name of individual creativity.
"You can't open a door til there's a house."
"I thought that’s what genius was. I had a dream which was not all a dream."
Paradise - or Arcadia - had been morphed from the classical calm of Virgil and Ancient Greece to romantic chaos. From thinking to feeling. Stoppard suggests this skirmish is in us all, to this present day. The battle of romantics and classicists. Should we allow it to engulf us, we would become as Septimus, a romantic trying to vindicate the ideas of his lost love Thomasina, to understand the rules that govern the world and battle the impulse to overthrow them and create anew.
"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?"
Chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics are some of the central metaphors in Arcadia that influence the structure of the work itself.
Thomasina attempts to find scientific explanations for the world around her and, quite successfully, sees the basis of chaos theory in the movement of the jam in her bowl. The trails of jam move toward a larger disorder that cannot be stirred back together by going the other direction. This move toward greater and greater disorder is characteristic of chaos theory as explained by Valentine later on. Chaos theory helps scientists get closer to the everyday happenings of things around them from "what happens in a cup of coffee." Like the repeated algorithm in iteration, the jam continues to be more disordered because of where it came from; each equation uses the answer of the last equation for its unknown values. In other words, the iteration or stirring continues and the equation continually changes.
Thomasina's algebra and geometry lessons culminate into her genius understanding of the laws of thermodynamics and chaos theory. The laws of thermodynamics dictate the fate of all the characters on stage, and the realisation of such fate eventually conclude the play
"When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore."
In the end, Thomasina has drawn a picture of a reality where all humanity is doomed and destined for a fiery end. The eagerness of Thomasina—the creator of the frightening picture of mortality—to dance reveals that there are many types of knowledge to be had in the world and new mysteries to be solved. With dance, with love, with carnal knowledge, one might avoid the empty shore.
One would have much more to say on Arcadia, however the margin is too small, and I haven’t got the space for it. There is a sudden urgency for time and moment as both Play and review come to an end, and even I must submit to a waltz. Lord Byron is kind enough to teach me.
“VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?
BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.”
***
I have an endless stream of thoughts regarding Arcadia, but I don’t know in what way I can connect them in a coherent block of text. I know my views; I just don’t know how to express them when it comes to some writings I adore. From thinking to feeling. Yes, I adore this Play.
I adore Tom Stoppard.
To begin with, I don’t usually read plays. I haven’t the patience nor command of patience for them. It all stems from school (of course), from being forced to read plays I could not and would not relate to and then having to sing the playwright’s praises as being my country’s “best and brightest”, even though realistically, the man would be a bore.
"Your tea gets cold by itself but it doesn’t get hot by itself, do you think that’s odd?"
Oh. Oh dear...
Tom Stoppard is no bore.
Arcadia is a labyrinth of algebra and literature, sexual affairs and physics, Classicism and Romanticism, Nineteenth and Twentieth century. Amusing beyond measure, mournful, erudite and written with such commendable style, it succeeds in its copulation of simplicity and complexity without being pretentious or gaudy.
Against the backdrop of a common re-landscaping of a manor house, the stage is set representing the intellectual shift that was sweeping over the world at that time.
"It's what happened to the Enlightenment, isn't it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and fake beauty... The decline from thinking to feeling, you see."
It's the old division that obsessed the 18th century. The classical order – which mutated into the Enlightenment – believed the world was ordered and was governed by rules that could be slowly uncovered. The Romantics believed this was a suffocating cage in which humanity was imprisoned, and sought to overthrow all rules in the name of individual creativity.
"You can't open a door til there's a house."
"I thought that’s what genius was. I had a dream which was not all a dream."
Paradise - or Arcadia - had been morphed from the classical calm of Virgil and Ancient Greece to romantic chaos. From thinking to feeling. Stoppard suggests this skirmish is in us all, to this present day. The battle of romantics and classicists. Should we allow it to engulf us, we would become as Septimus, a romantic trying to vindicate the ideas of his lost love Thomasina, to understand the rules that govern the world and battle the impulse to overthrow them and create anew.
"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?"
Chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics are some of the central metaphors in Arcadia that influence the structure of the work itself.
Thomasina attempts to find scientific explanations for the world around her and, quite successfully, sees the basis of chaos theory in the movement of the jam in her bowl. The trails of jam move toward a larger disorder that cannot be stirred back together by going the other direction. This move toward greater and greater disorder is characteristic of chaos theory as explained by Valentine later on. Chaos theory helps scientists get closer to the everyday happenings of things around them from "what happens in a cup of coffee." Like the repeated algorithm in iteration, the jam continues to be more disordered because of where it came from; each equation uses the answer of the last equation for its unknown values. In other words, the iteration or stirring continues and the equation continually changes.
Thomasina's algebra and geometry lessons culminate into her genius understanding of the laws of thermodynamics and chaos theory. The laws of thermodynamics dictate the fate of all the characters on stage, and the realisation of such fate eventually conclude the play
"When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore."
In the end, Thomasina has drawn a picture of a reality where all humanity is doomed and destined for a fiery end. The eagerness of Thomasina—the creator of the frightening picture of mortality—to dance reveals that there are many types of knowledge to be had in the world and new mysteries to be solved. With dance, with love, with carnal knowledge, one might avoid the empty shore.
One would have much more to say on Arcadia, however the margin is too small, and I haven’t got the space for it. There is a sudden urgency for time and moment as both Play and review come to an end, and even I must submit to a waltz. Lord Byron is kind enough to teach me.
“VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?
BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.”
April 26, 2024
THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?
SEPTIMUS: my greatest and only skill besides witty banter
THOMASINA: can you show me?
SEPTIMUS: nah, 13 is still too young for me, we will wait for that demonstration until you're 17 and an adult
anyway other than THAT random plot twist this was delightful
SEPTIMUS: my greatest and only skill besides witty banter
THOMASINA: can you show me?
SEPTIMUS: nah, 13 is still too young for me, we will wait for that demonstration until you're 17 and an adult
anyway other than THAT random plot twist this was delightful
May 20, 2009
My favorite play by Tom Stoppard, who’s often been referred to as one of the cleverest and most literate minds currently writing for the stage – or anywhere else, for that matter. His work is unfailingly intellectual in the best sense of the word, alive with the energy of a naturally brilliant and inquisitive mind constantly in motion: gleefully absorbing new information, delighting in the juxtaposition of unlikely ideas (philosophy and gymnastics, for example) and forever doubling back to challenge and test its own conclusions. Add to that his irresistible, infectious delight in the possibilities of language – including a gift for epigram that Oscar Wilde would envy and a flair for witty, original metaphor - and you have a playwright who rewards an audience’s commitment and attention more richly than any I can think of. Though he’s sometimes been criticized for being too intellectual, even self-consciously so, and therefore not capable of engaging an audience’s emotions, in ARCADIA I think he achieves an artistic equilibrium that no one can question, creating a kind of thinking-person’s romance, a play that is both intellectually stimulating and deeply moving. Balancing modern chaos theory against a young girl’s awakening sexuality, the birth of Romanticism against the absolute end of the universe, with excursions along the way into English literary history, landscape gardening, the nature of genius, and the tendency of history to shape-shift depending on who’s interpreting it, for me this is the most complex and lyrical work in his very distinguished (and still expanding!) canon. Stoppard himself considers it the most successful of his plays from the storytelling standpoint, and it’s perhaps also the most successful at making its cleverness intrinsic to character. The historical characters, contemporaries of Jane Austen, are witty because they live in a time when conversation is the arena for virtually every human interaction and a quick wit is valued accordingly; the contemporary characters are clever because they’re so highly educated – academics all, they are almost flamboyantly articulate. In both cases, their cleverness is a function of who they are, and not of who Tom Stoppard is. But we do catch glimpses of the author in several of his creations: in the critic Bernard Nightingale, his overactive brain careening from one hypothesis to another; in the scholar Hannah Jarvis, with her belief that our humanity is defined by our restless curiosity about the universe (“It’s wanting to know that makes us matter…”); even in the hilarious hack poet Ezra Chater, complaining about the inner circle of critics who so cavalierly dismiss his work as trivial while promoting their own protégés. But the truest voice of Tom Stoppard may belong to Thomasina Coverley, the 13 year old math prodigy, radiant with the prospect of all there is to know, passionate with grief over knowledge already squandered, all the possibilities of life (both intellectual and emotional) still before her. It says a great deal, I think, about Stoppard that this should be so, because in another sense ARCADIA is a play that could really only be written in middle age, evoking the magical optimism of youth with the hard-won wisdom of maturity and a wry compassion for human fallibility. It is both vernal and autumnal, equal parts hope and rue, not quite a comedy, but not quite a tragedy either – very much like life. A poignant and exhilarating play.
May 24, 2012
I would like to make it clear, right out front, that I adore some of Tom Stoppard's work. But this is insufferable, elitist piffle. The fact that it is so highly praised in so many circles confirms, to my mind, that the arts, like the rest of our culture, are utterly degenerate.
Kurt Vonnegut once described the job of a writer as being "a good date." With "Arcadia," Stoppard wears too much cologne, won't stop talking about himself, blows smoke in our face, farts in the elevator, and seems to think that going Dutch is the height of romance.
I keep picturing a reasonably well-educated audience shelling out $50-plus per ticket only to find out that they should have studied up on the landscape architecture of the early 19th century, the minutia of Lord Byron's dissolute indiscretions, and the basics of chaos theory. I had the advantage of being familiar with the latter. I had to turn to various references for the rest. (Really, Tom? I'm an uneducated bumpkin because I'm unfamiliar with Capability Brown!? Shmoiks!) Whereas I have the Web at my disposal to elucidate these subjects with little effort, one can imagine the frustration of audiences suffering through this complacent mess 20 years ago.
I suppose Stoppard might earn higher marks if I though he was having some fun at the expense of his audience. As it stands, this play reads the way Charles Ives sounds: very clever and equally unpleasant. It took me two days to chew my way through this mess and, at the end of it, I didn't feel the slightest connection to any of the characters or themes presented. Stoppard can do much better, and shame on the critics who have praised the emperor's clothes this time around. (Docked one star for wasting my time on the antics of a sad clown such as Lord Byron, who ought to be memorialized in day-glo on velvet.)
Kurt Vonnegut once described the job of a writer as being "a good date." With "Arcadia," Stoppard wears too much cologne, won't stop talking about himself, blows smoke in our face, farts in the elevator, and seems to think that going Dutch is the height of romance.
I keep picturing a reasonably well-educated audience shelling out $50-plus per ticket only to find out that they should have studied up on the landscape architecture of the early 19th century, the minutia of Lord Byron's dissolute indiscretions, and the basics of chaos theory. I had the advantage of being familiar with the latter. I had to turn to various references for the rest. (Really, Tom? I'm an uneducated bumpkin because I'm unfamiliar with Capability Brown!? Shmoiks!) Whereas I have the Web at my disposal to elucidate these subjects with little effort, one can imagine the frustration of audiences suffering through this complacent mess 20 years ago.
I suppose Stoppard might earn higher marks if I though he was having some fun at the expense of his audience. As it stands, this play reads the way Charles Ives sounds: very clever and equally unpleasant. It took me two days to chew my way through this mess and, at the end of it, I didn't feel the slightest connection to any of the characters or themes presented. Stoppard can do much better, and shame on the critics who have praised the emperor's clothes this time around. (Docked one star for wasting my time on the antics of a sad clown such as Lord Byron, who ought to be memorialized in day-glo on velvet.)
December 30, 2011
I should have liked this more than I did, truly. I mean, I get that this is a play about how one goes about mapping emotional and physical complexity onto intellectual models and how it breaks down and breaks apart, in the same way that Romanticism signalled the end of the Enlightenment, or how the two had trouble coexisting in the same garden. (But they can be united! By fractals! And sex!)
My problems were thus:
1) I didn't like any of the characters. They were all so self-impressed, self-pleasing, and -- while obviously the vessels of very interesting ideas -- not fully fleshed people. They were more like lots of mini Tom Stoppards, dressed in various clothing, making Tom Stoppard jokes and spouting Tom Stoppard philosophies. I probably could have gotten over this had the ideas been solid enough. However;
2) The play collapsed for me under the weight of several sloppy conclusions and overextended metaphors which, judging by the general tone of condescension in the dialogue, seemed to be gesturing at some kind of capital "T" Truth - or at least towards the Truth of the Classicism/Romanticism leitmotif. When Chloe and Valentine are talking about sex as the main flaw in a kind of Newtonian determinism - I was all like, what? "The people you are supposed to like" vs those you do is meaningless. Newton doesn't suppose you like anyone. And the people you do actually like (due to their smell or physical attributes or whatever the evolutionary psychologists would say) is perfectly in step with this kind of determinism (even though I personally don't buy the neo-Dawkinsian absence of free will - but I digress). The point is, I really don't like it when an author tries to shove a Big Idea into a shape that will fit his agenda, not caring if it, you know, doesn't.
3) The extension of Newton's laws to the mapping of a determinist future via a great godlike equation is not Thomasina's or Stoppard's idea - it belongs to LaPlace's Demon, which for some reason is never mentioned. However, Thomasina's discovery of fractals (which Stoppard just calls iterative algorithms for some reason) and fractals as a kind of "metaphoric shape" of determinism is interesting. The problem is that you can't really draw nature accurately from fractals. The smaller parts that make up a leaf are not leaf-shaped. And the parts that make up those parts are shaped differently still. The fractals Thomasina are drawing are just as sterile and divorced from Nature-reality as the textbook geometric shapes she claims to despise. Or maybe that was the point of Valentine giving up his grouse, for the "noise"? That's interesting -- but I don't think it's Stoppard's ultimate aim. Thomasina's potential unity of classical logic and Romantic naturalism via her "algebraic iterations" is treated with the reverence of a Truth. See Valentine's happy ending when he takes up her equations and feeds them into his computer - I mean, nobody ever questions Thomasina's equations as a false representation of nature. ARGH.
4) Why does the second law of thermodynamics drive Septimus mad? I understand that the heat death of the universe hadn't yet been formally discovered in his time - but Armageddon (classical, Romantic) and Decay (scientific, mathematic) are not new ideas in 1809. And Septimus seems to be a naturally skeptical person anyway who doesn't have any pretensions towards immortality. OK, so maybe it was Thomasina's death that drove him mad, but he only had like two days to fall in love with her. And he was in love with like three people across the course of the play. Yeah yeah, poetic license. This still annoyed me as I don't think Septimus was developed enough for this to seem plausible.
5) Finally, what does sex have to do with any of this, really, except that it is titillating -- perhaps Stoppard thought that his audience would need a cookie to be able to apprehend any kind of "interlectual" concept? Don't get me wrong -- I happen to like sex. But why does it seem that every play I've seen in the past 10 years (excepting Ionesco's super-duper "Rhinoceros" and "The Lady in Black") has been a sex play, chock full of wink-wink nudge-nudge innuendo and bed-swapping infidelity? Sex is a plot microwave - a cheap gimmick for creating fast-n-easy narrative conflict, and if I'm sick of it by age 30 then it must be overdone. Or maybe the sex just didn't appeal to me because the characters were more the author's personal ideas than real people, and rather than be interested in their relationships, I felt trapped in a Tom Stoppard masturbatory fantasy? Wink wink. Nudge nudge. (Vomit vomit.)
However, that said - I did enjoy it overall and at least it tried to weave in some interesting ideas. It was funny besides. And I really appreciate the layered past and present and simultaneous dialogue in the last scene, the overlapping props like fractals iterating in every scene - very clever. So much cleverness in this play and in Stoppard. I wish it moved me more.
My problems were thus:
1) I didn't like any of the characters. They were all so self-impressed, self-pleasing, and -- while obviously the vessels of very interesting ideas -- not fully fleshed people. They were more like lots of mini Tom Stoppards, dressed in various clothing, making Tom Stoppard jokes and spouting Tom Stoppard philosophies. I probably could have gotten over this had the ideas been solid enough. However;
2) The play collapsed for me under the weight of several sloppy conclusions and overextended metaphors which, judging by the general tone of condescension in the dialogue, seemed to be gesturing at some kind of capital "T" Truth - or at least towards the Truth of the Classicism/Romanticism leitmotif. When Chloe and Valentine are talking about sex as the main flaw in a kind of Newtonian determinism - I was all like, what? "The people you are supposed to like" vs those you do is meaningless. Newton doesn't suppose you like anyone. And the people you do actually like (due to their smell or physical attributes or whatever the evolutionary psychologists would say) is perfectly in step with this kind of determinism (even though I personally don't buy the neo-Dawkinsian absence of free will - but I digress). The point is, I really don't like it when an author tries to shove a Big Idea into a shape that will fit his agenda, not caring if it, you know, doesn't.
3) The extension of Newton's laws to the mapping of a determinist future via a great godlike equation is not Thomasina's or Stoppard's idea - it belongs to LaPlace's Demon, which for some reason is never mentioned. However, Thomasina's discovery of fractals (which Stoppard just calls iterative algorithms for some reason) and fractals as a kind of "metaphoric shape" of determinism is interesting. The problem is that you can't really draw nature accurately from fractals. The smaller parts that make up a leaf are not leaf-shaped. And the parts that make up those parts are shaped differently still. The fractals Thomasina are drawing are just as sterile and divorced from Nature-reality as the textbook geometric shapes she claims to despise. Or maybe that was the point of Valentine giving up his grouse, for the "noise"? That's interesting -- but I don't think it's Stoppard's ultimate aim. Thomasina's potential unity of classical logic and Romantic naturalism via her "algebraic iterations" is treated with the reverence of a Truth. See Valentine's happy ending when he takes up her equations and feeds them into his computer - I mean, nobody ever questions Thomasina's equations as a false representation of nature. ARGH.
4) Why does the second law of thermodynamics drive Septimus mad? I understand that the heat death of the universe hadn't yet been formally discovered in his time - but Armageddon (classical, Romantic) and Decay (scientific, mathematic) are not new ideas in 1809. And Septimus seems to be a naturally skeptical person anyway who doesn't have any pretensions towards immortality. OK, so maybe it was Thomasina's death that drove him mad, but he only had like two days to fall in love with her. And he was in love with like three people across the course of the play. Yeah yeah, poetic license. This still annoyed me as I don't think Septimus was developed enough for this to seem plausible.
5) Finally, what does sex have to do with any of this, really, except that it is titillating -- perhaps Stoppard thought that his audience would need a cookie to be able to apprehend any kind of "interlectual" concept? Don't get me wrong -- I happen to like sex. But why does it seem that every play I've seen in the past 10 years (excepting Ionesco's super-duper "Rhinoceros" and "The Lady in Black") has been a sex play, chock full of wink-wink nudge-nudge innuendo and bed-swapping infidelity? Sex is a plot microwave - a cheap gimmick for creating fast-n-easy narrative conflict, and if I'm sick of it by age 30 then it must be overdone. Or maybe the sex just didn't appeal to me because the characters were more the author's personal ideas than real people, and rather than be interested in their relationships, I felt trapped in a Tom Stoppard masturbatory fantasy? Wink wink. Nudge nudge. (Vomit vomit.)
However, that said - I did enjoy it overall and at least it tried to weave in some interesting ideas. It was funny besides. And I really appreciate the layered past and present and simultaneous dialogue in the last scene, the overlapping props like fractals iterating in every scene - very clever. So much cleverness in this play and in Stoppard. I wish it moved me more.
March 13, 2021
Pazite, ako bih vam rekao da je neko napisao komad o navodnom duelu između Bajrona i jednog nesrećnog stihoklepca, koji je otkrio patuljastu daliju, a čija smrt nije bila vezana za ovaj sukob već za ugriz majmuna na Martiniku, što je mogla da bude inspiracija grupi naučnih njuškatora iz savremenosti, ali nije – šta biste mi rekli? Pride – tu je i mnogo govora o poslednjoj Fermanovoj teoremi, tetrebima, retorici kao čet-šouu, determinizmu, entropiji, toplotnoj smrti univerzuma, drugom zakonu termodinamike, epistemologiji, Aleksandrijskoj biblioteci, seksu, vremenu, Aristotelu, Njutnu i onima posle, i ko zna još čime sve ne; dok na sceni samo raste živahno pokućstvo od teodolita do prašnjavih tomova i nigde same arkadije nema, ali znamo da se negde neki vrt transformiše. A sve dobro uštimovano, vrcavo, duhovito i gorko-smešno. Pa vi vidite.
A uz sve, tu je i jedna kornjača, koja, možda baš i nije kornjača, ali dobro.
A uz sve, tu je i jedna kornjača, koja, možda baš i nije kornjača, ali dobro.
January 5, 2015
Philosophy vs science progress. What is more important to mankind? What makes us happy? The play Arcadia (1993) is complex. Stoppard explores many different themes and contrasts such as past and present, and order and disorder. They melt together and show that everything is connected.
The play is set in a country house, Sidley Park, in Derbyshire, and follows the lives of people living there in the 1800's and present day. This is a rich play with more questions than answers. It involves philosophy, history, classic literature, mystical poets like Lord Byron, landscape design, murder speculations, population dynamics, mathemathical algorithms and thermodynamics. And everything comes together perfectly. Some of the characters even investigate science that challenges Newton's theories of physics. It's very interesting for people with great curiousity.
The play also investigates the meaning of certainty, the nature of evidence and truth in modern ideas about history, mathematics and physics. Clues from the past can be interpreted in different ways. And because they can't be proven to be false, does that mean they are true? Is truth the necessary opposite of false? The characters are struggling with this problem when they are thinking about history and time. Much of the play centers around time - research about history and attempts of predicting the future with an equation, and the exceptions that make it impossible. They discuss the hypothetical theory about the prediction of the future being prevented by irregularities such as sex. Perhaps love is the exception of the rule, which makes the future so difficult to predict. The disorder in feelings, the contrast, or perhaps the connection, of passion and madness, is a kind of practical example of chaos theory. The concept of order vs chaos theory is explored in different ways, both in personal feelings and physical disorder (the table in the center of the room that collects objects from both time periods). The characters' social order moves into chaos, where time is depicted as a kind of illusion. However, there might be order in chaos, perhaps we are incapable of perceiving it because our lack of knowledge.
There's a tragic theme of smallness, universal insufficiency and the life going in one direction. Despite Newton's equations that goes both ways, there are certain events that are irreversible, like time, and fire and heat (the second law of thermodynamics), as well as the cooling universe and burned relationships. But the characters in the 1800's are living on in descendants and letters. Life is eternal, and at the same time, it is the exception of the rule. Stoppard paints this picture splendidly. When there's chaos, there are no longer any rules, and the different eras intermingle. The structure of the play is a work of art itself.
Last but not least, every theme is evolving from the source of love and death and it's both tragic, comical and thrilling. And regardless of time they think and reflect. This is a play for people not wanting to be served answers, but prefer to interpret and form their opinions along the way. Answers are not important. Conversation is. So, connecting the dots, philosophy or science progress, reflection or knowledge? When the characters face a dark future, and when the world is doomed – due to chaos theory - they turn to music and waltz. So, perhaps that is one answer to the question about what's more important to mankind?
The play is set in a country house, Sidley Park, in Derbyshire, and follows the lives of people living there in the 1800's and present day. This is a rich play with more questions than answers. It involves philosophy, history, classic literature, mystical poets like Lord Byron, landscape design, murder speculations, population dynamics, mathemathical algorithms and thermodynamics. And everything comes together perfectly. Some of the characters even investigate science that challenges Newton's theories of physics. It's very interesting for people with great curiousity.
The play also investigates the meaning of certainty, the nature of evidence and truth in modern ideas about history, mathematics and physics. Clues from the past can be interpreted in different ways. And because they can't be proven to be false, does that mean they are true? Is truth the necessary opposite of false? The characters are struggling with this problem when they are thinking about history and time. Much of the play centers around time - research about history and attempts of predicting the future with an equation, and the exceptions that make it impossible. They discuss the hypothetical theory about the prediction of the future being prevented by irregularities such as sex. Perhaps love is the exception of the rule, which makes the future so difficult to predict. The disorder in feelings, the contrast, or perhaps the connection, of passion and madness, is a kind of practical example of chaos theory. The concept of order vs chaos theory is explored in different ways, both in personal feelings and physical disorder (the table in the center of the room that collects objects from both time periods). The characters' social order moves into chaos, where time is depicted as a kind of illusion. However, there might be order in chaos, perhaps we are incapable of perceiving it because our lack of knowledge.
There's a tragic theme of smallness, universal insufficiency and the life going in one direction. Despite Newton's equations that goes both ways, there are certain events that are irreversible, like time, and fire and heat (the second law of thermodynamics), as well as the cooling universe and burned relationships. But the characters in the 1800's are living on in descendants and letters. Life is eternal, and at the same time, it is the exception of the rule. Stoppard paints this picture splendidly. When there's chaos, there are no longer any rules, and the different eras intermingle. The structure of the play is a work of art itself.
Last but not least, every theme is evolving from the source of love and death and it's both tragic, comical and thrilling. And regardless of time they think and reflect. This is a play for people not wanting to be served answers, but prefer to interpret and form their opinions along the way. Answers are not important. Conversation is. So, connecting the dots, philosophy or science progress, reflection or knowledge? When the characters face a dark future, and when the world is doomed – due to chaos theory - they turn to music and waltz. So, perhaps that is one answer to the question about what's more important to mankind?
July 31, 2019
What a brilliant play! Would love to see it on stage.
4.5*
4.5*
March 1, 2020
From TIA:
BBCR4 - Saturday Play 2007
Arcadia: Tom Stoppard's acclaimed comedy about the lives and preoccupations of the inhabitants of Sidley Park, Derbyshire in the early 19th and late 20th centuries.
BBC Radio 3
Broadcast: Sunday 26th December 1993
Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" represents two time periods, the Romantic Era of the early 1800's and Modern time. He intertwines these periods and characters freely throughout the entire play, giving the audience a wonderful perspective on human perception and interaction.
The characters of the present are trying to discover what happened in the past. Hannah and Bernard are both searching for the Romantic ideal (Hannah with her hermit and Bernard with Lord Byron). The characters of the past are discovering the future. Thomasina (the true Romantic ideal) foresees the concepts of Thermodynamics, Fractal Geometry, and Chaos Theory. Her tutor Septimus tries to work out how these concepts can be forestalled.
Stoppard explores the nature of truth and history, the conflict between Classical and Romantic thought, mathematics and chaos theory, English landscape architecture, and, ultimately, love both familial and familiar.
Original Music by Jeremy Sams.
Directed by David Benedictus.
Felicity Kendal.......... Hannah Jarvis
Bill Nighy............... Bernard Nightingale
Samuel West.............. Valentine Coverly
Rufus Sewell............. Septimus Hodge
Emma Fielding............ Thomasina Coverly
Harriet Walter........... Lady Croom
Harriet Harrison......... Cloe Coverly
Timothy Matthews......... Gus/Augustus Coverly
Derek Hutchinson......... Chater
Sidney Livingstone....... Richard Noakes
Graham Sinclair.......... Captain Brice
Alan Mitchell............ Jellaby, the butler
https://archive.org/details/arcadiato...
BBCR4 - Saturday Play 2007
Arcadia: Tom Stoppard's acclaimed comedy about the lives and preoccupations of the inhabitants of Sidley Park, Derbyshire in the early 19th and late 20th centuries.
BBC Radio 3
Broadcast: Sunday 26th December 1993
Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" represents two time periods, the Romantic Era of the early 1800's and Modern time. He intertwines these periods and characters freely throughout the entire play, giving the audience a wonderful perspective on human perception and interaction.
The characters of the present are trying to discover what happened in the past. Hannah and Bernard are both searching for the Romantic ideal (Hannah with her hermit and Bernard with Lord Byron). The characters of the past are discovering the future. Thomasina (the true Romantic ideal) foresees the concepts of Thermodynamics, Fractal Geometry, and Chaos Theory. Her tutor Septimus tries to work out how these concepts can be forestalled.
Stoppard explores the nature of truth and history, the conflict between Classical and Romantic thought, mathematics and chaos theory, English landscape architecture, and, ultimately, love both familial and familiar.
Original Music by Jeremy Sams.
Directed by David Benedictus.
Felicity Kendal.......... Hannah Jarvis
Bill Nighy............... Bernard Nightingale
Samuel West.............. Valentine Coverly
Rufus Sewell............. Septimus Hodge
Emma Fielding............ Thomasina Coverly
Harriet Walter........... Lady Croom
Harriet Harrison......... Cloe Coverly
Timothy Matthews......... Gus/Augustus Coverly
Derek Hutchinson......... Chater
Sidney Livingstone....... Richard Noakes
Graham Sinclair.......... Captain Brice
Alan Mitchell............ Jellaby, the butler
https://archive.org/details/arcadiato...
February 28, 2022
1.5 STARS
I wish I could give a valid reason as to why I disliked Arcadia, but, to be honest, I just thought it was boring. I appreciate the cleverness of intertwining the Romantic Era with Modern time, as well as the dramatic irony in one set of characters looking toward the past while another set looks to the future. However, the characters were insufferable and not in an entertaining way. I did read this for a class, so that likely largely contributes to my dislike for it, but I would not recommend this.
I wish I could give a valid reason as to why I disliked Arcadia, but, to be honest, I just thought it was boring. I appreciate the cleverness of intertwining the Romantic Era with Modern time, as well as the dramatic irony in one set of characters looking toward the past while another set looks to the future. However, the characters were insufferable and not in an entertaining way. I did read this for a class, so that likely largely contributes to my dislike for it, but I would not recommend this.
March 21, 2018
یه نمایشنامهی پستمدرن که حس میکنم جنبههای اجرایی جذابتری داشته باشه نسبت به متن! مخصوصاً صحنهی هفتم نمایشنامه... البته از ترجمهی خیلی بد خانم سیمین زرگران هم نباید گذشت! نمایشنامه به شدت پر از اصطلاحات و تعاریف و تفسیرهای علمیه که مترجم از پس برگردانیش به فارسی برنیومده و خیلی از جملات گنگه!
April 10, 2021
I'm not often to be found chuckling out loud at 7:30 am reading a theatre script, but that's how this went.
A classic Stoppard work about love, sex, time, science, literature... and gardens.
A classic Stoppard work about love, sex, time, science, literature... and gardens.
November 13, 2015
If I were a theatre critic, the blurb they'd get from me would be "Clever, witty, and far beyond."
Listening while and in between reading it:
Schubert: String Quartets played by Quatuor Mosaiques
Janacek: String Quartets played by the Skampa Quartet
Hank Mobley: Messages
Listening while and in between reading it:
Schubert: String Quartets played by Quatuor Mosaiques
Janacek: String Quartets played by the Skampa Quartet
Hank Mobley: Messages
October 11, 2021
I just love this play. This week, I get to teach about landscape gardening and the laws of thermodynamics. Such fun.
September 26, 2013
Arcadia is a fatalistic farce, a comedy about the consequences of taking poetry and science seriously. It juxtaposes scenes from two different time periods, early 19th century and present day England. The scene is a Derbyshire country house. One time period is trying to predict the future the other trying to reconstruct the past.
In 1809 Septimus Hodge the tutor of Thomasina is helping her to make mathematical discoveries, Septimus has been discovered in a compromised position with the poet Ezra Chater's wife. In the present day Hannah Jarvis is researching a mysterious hermit who once lived at the estate, and Bernard Nightingale wants to prove Byron killed Chater in a duel.
In the final act the two time periods come together, unseen characters from the two time periods act together oblivious to each other's presence. There is a beautiful and clever eb and flow of time in the last scene when two couples from the different time periods are dancing side by side. The past dancing with the present. It's quite refreshing in terms of staging and I'm sure it places rewarding and challenging demands on stage directors and actors.
Arcadia is intelligent, elegant and witty. Romanticism, classical design, mathematics, natural philosophy, quantum physics, poetry, landscape gardening are all represented. It's a play of ideas. There is also a literary detective story. Did a duel take place between an angry husband and a famous poet? What has Fermat's last theorem got to do with the mysterious identity of the hermit in the garden? There's a suggestion that we go on yet humans are constantly repeating history with only small deviations. It would be easy to get more out of this on a re-reading. It's an unusual and captivating play.
In 1809 Septimus Hodge the tutor of Thomasina is helping her to make mathematical discoveries, Septimus has been discovered in a compromised position with the poet Ezra Chater's wife. In the present day Hannah Jarvis is researching a mysterious hermit who once lived at the estate, and Bernard Nightingale wants to prove Byron killed Chater in a duel.
In the final act the two time periods come together, unseen characters from the two time periods act together oblivious to each other's presence. There is a beautiful and clever eb and flow of time in the last scene when two couples from the different time periods are dancing side by side. The past dancing with the present. It's quite refreshing in terms of staging and I'm sure it places rewarding and challenging demands on stage directors and actors.
Arcadia is intelligent, elegant and witty. Romanticism, classical design, mathematics, natural philosophy, quantum physics, poetry, landscape gardening are all represented. It's a play of ideas. There is also a literary detective story. Did a duel take place between an angry husband and a famous poet? What has Fermat's last theorem got to do with the mysterious identity of the hermit in the garden? There's a suggestion that we go on yet humans are constantly repeating history with only small deviations. It would be easy to get more out of this on a re-reading. It's an unusual and captivating play.
April 28, 2016
The minority report once more, alas. Although reading a play, rather than seeing it in a theater (especially with the quality of actor and actress that Tom Stoppard's work usually brings onstage), is like judging food made with only half the ingredients of the recipe. This is a work half-set in an England about to begin its Regency period, with lots of nineteenth romantic bravura--precocious and doomed genius, trysts in the gazebo, sailing to gather specimens, and dueling, into which Lord Byron threatens to, but does not, intrude. That part is the full Stoppard--impossibly articulate characters, in turn witty, foolish, amorous and philosophical. The problem is that, tenuous as the charms of proto-Regency country estates are, the half-baked but full-throttled academic speculation (inasmuch as scholarly discussions of 19th century English gardens and forgotten poets have a throttle) are even less engaging. Yes, there is much ado about time and philosophy and the art and limitations of knowing, this being Stoppard, but he has taken on these issues with greater invention and wit elsewhere. And perhaps it is these other works that make me so disappointed with "Arcadia." When I read "Rosencrantz and Guilderstern" it was with the excitement of discovery, of seeing a fresh path for English-language theater away from the enclosed family tragedies of O'Neill and the even more enclosed explorations of private failure of Beckett and Pinter. Perhaps some of the energy that John Osborne might have brought if we had been wittier and less narcissistic. In any case, the pre-Regency segments of "Arcadia" strive mightily to generate a heat and energy that the interpolated academic needling dissipates. Sometimes all the Stoppardian fireworks illumine. And sometimes they just explode.
November 30, 2018
Listened to an audio version of this on the recommendation of Rachel Manija Brown and loved it. It explores ideas in mathematics and physics, and the play itself loops around in a recursive way, such that characters from the present echo those in the past; it pokes fun at academic research and fashion in literature and landscape gardening; and it manages to contain both great one-off quips and thought-provoking ruminations without either feeling forced. Thomasina, a thirteen-year-old with a gift for mathematics, wants to create equations to represent the forms of the natural world--a leaf, a hare--and not just cone, cubes, and squares. She, her tutor Septimus, and the present-day scholar Valentine get some of the best lines, but it's stuffed full of great lines. I'm not big into theater, but after listening to this, I really yearn to see it performed.
ETA: And today (11/29/2018) I got to see a production at UMass Amherst--very nicely done; liked the Nightingale character especially. Wonderful play.
ETA: And today (11/29/2018) I got to see a production at UMass Amherst--very nicely done; liked the Nightingale character especially. Wonderful play.
June 26, 2015
I listened to the audio version of this in the car and just loved it. It was a full ensemble, made easy by the fact that it's a play, so everything is spoken anyway. It's so clever, and keeps you on your toes trying to figure out the relationships and what's going on. It was sometimes a little tough to figure out the voices and who was speaking, but I'm pretty sure I got most of it.
The words and ideas in this are just so beautiful. It's a story about science concepts and historical dialogue, and looking into the past from the present as best one can. It's a fascinating study in how it's entirely possible to put together the clues from the past entirely wrong.
The words and ideas in this are just so beautiful. It's a story about science concepts and historical dialogue, and looking into the past from the present as best one can. It's a fascinating study in how it's entirely possible to put together the clues from the past entirely wrong.
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