Arcadia: A Play in Two Acts (1993 original; edició 1993)

Historical research, Newton’s laws of physics, romance... what’s not to love!? Stoppard outdid himself with Arcadia. Even outside a classroom setting, this play has high returns - even for a casual read. ( )

An LA Theatre Works full cast audio production of Tom Stoppard's play. With two parallel timelines, the play occurs at an English country house both in the present with two scholars who have warring pet theses and in 1809-1812 when the events the scholars are arguing over actually occurred. There's plenty of witty repartee, a smattering of math and chaos theory, and Lord Byron has a wander through the proceedings. Very fun and funny, I'd be delighted to see a live production of this at some point. My only quibble is that the digital audiobook I borrowed was obviously converted from CD (there's change disc instructions in the audio), and while usually with LATW productions they put interviews with scholars about the play/content at the end, this one placed it between Acts I and II. The discussion was informative but it included several spoilers for the second half, which was unfortunate as this was my first experience with the play. Recommended. ( )

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. ( )

It seems that out of chaos comes order; out of chaos truth is revealed, and that everything happens for a reason. It seems that Newton was on to something....or not. Curiosity, both intellectual and sexual, makes the world go around...and much more fulfilling. Not an easy task to put on the stage, but Mr. Stoppard does so with ease and panache. Brilliant... ( )

Often when I was reading this I was reminded of the Maxwell's Demon sections of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 - having your characters ponder the idea that the inexorable progression of entropy in the universe will lead to ultimate heat death is a sure-fire way to introduce some philosophical heft to the action while giving you the opportunity to play with some related concepts like free will vs determinism or Newtonian physics vs chaos theory. I love high-concept literature, and Stoppard really packs in discussions of mathematical foundations, scientific research, poetry, theories of art, Romanticism, and a lot of other thoughtful material, even having the two timelines of the play converge in the final scene to suggest that what looks like a bunch of irreconcilable antinomies don't have to be so mutually exclusive when you look at the big picture. However, even though this is evidently Stoppard's most acclaimed play I found the dialogue overly didactic and the characters frequently didn't resonate. I suppose most theatre-goers prefer to have characters discussing concepts like normal humans rather than having to sit and absorb infodumps, but while I appreciate a playwright who makes his audience think, as a whole something about the play prevented me from loving it. Maybe it's better live on the stage than still on the page. ( )