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Title: Arcadia ISBN: 9780571169344Published September 24th 1994 by Faber Faber (first published 1993) · Paperback 97 pages
Genre: Plays, Drama, Fiction, Theatre, Classics, Historical, Historical Fiction, Academic, School, Literature, European Literature, British Literature
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This weekend I was looking at my almost seven year old daughter and marveling at how quickly she’s grown up. I thought: she’s still so young and she’s still so new. But then I thought: no, she’s not. Not really. The atoms and molecules that make up her body are actually billions of years old. Inside, she carries pieces of what are now distant stars. She carries pieces of the original humans. She carries pieces of me. She carries pieces of her children. And yet, there has never been and there will never be her exact configuration of all of these pieces. She will only exist for a fraction of the blink of an eye in the history of the universe. She’s eternal, and she’s so terribly finite.
And I guess that is the main thing that blazed out at me from the pages of this play. I may have missed the point. I may have missed several points. But overall, Stoppard made me think a lot about how we are both eternal and momentary. Nothing is guaranteed. Maybe there is a formula which could take into account the exact position and direction of every atom at a single moment and predict the future. But there will always be an element of the unpredictable. There will always be a theorem too long to transcribe or a letter gone astray or a candle left burning. You might die on the eve of your seventeenth birthday. You might live out decades of solitude and regret. You only get this brief lifetime to make new discoveries and fail spectacularly and learn to waltz. Our lives are one long chain of entropy trade-offs until we finally have nothing left to trade and become dust and ash. But then again, we live on: in memories, however false; in our children; in the very soil. Even things that we think are lost irrevocably have a tendency to turn up again (and again and again – if only we had the perspective to see it happening).
“We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and 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 is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.”
These are just a small fraction of the thoughts which were awakened to vivid clarity in me by this deceptively short, two act play. Stoppard weaves together two generations with history, coincidence, and conjecture. In the past, young student Thomasina and her tutor Septimus discuss geometry, thermodynamics, and carnal embraces during an eventful period at Sidley Park Manor. In the future, “gutsy” academic Bernard tries (and mostly fails) to decipher the past and stir up some scandal about Lord Byron, while the more level-headed Hannah plays the voice of reason. The two generations bleed into and out of each other. Into this circular timeline Stoppard flawlessly integrates Fermat’s last theorem, fractal geometry, Newtonian physics, chaos theory, botany, adultery, and fatal monkey bites.
I know that all sounds monumentally intellectual but please don’t be scared away. This play is above all, witty, entertaining, and profoundly meaningful.
Perfect Musical Pairing
Chopin - Waltz Op. 64 No. 2
Bonus (Flannery's pick!): Brad Mehldau - Exit Music (For a Film)
After reading this play I now have two more things to add to my bucket list:
1) Learn to Waltz
2) See Arcadia performed on stage.
Also seen at The Readventurer.
nostalgebraist
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.)
Kelly
[And after all that... it all ends in people waltzing, oblivious to it all going up in flames.
I endlessly, endlessly love this play. (hide spoiler)]
Roger Brunyate
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.
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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.
Maxwell
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.
Dave Schaafsma
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.
Marc
“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.
Elle (ellexamines)
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". (view spoiler)
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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Anne
The only play I've ever read that made me want to be an actor, however briefly--just for long enough to speak some of Stoppard's incredible lines. Witty, erudite, passionate, petty, catty, dry, elegant or vile, there's not a character who doesn't get off a zinger at least once per appearance, and usually oftener. Lady Croome alone barely walks into a room without puncturing egos left, right and center. Encountering a scene of midnight shenanigans in her country house, she tells the perps they're lucky "a lifetime's devotion to the sporting gun has halved my husband's hearing to the ear on which he sleeps." Even the stage directions are good, including in the props list "a turtle sleepy enough to serve as a paperweight."
The play itself is farcical, heartbreaking, hysterical, intellectual, romantic, dramatic, serious and silly, and if you ever see a gifted company perform it, it'll be one of the best nights of theater possible. I was fortunate in that I saw it at the Denver Center the same week I first read the script, and the uniformly excellent cast and the flawless production made it the version all others must live up to. But just reading it can perfectly well blow your mind anyway.
Arcadia is, at its simplest, two stories: that of young prodigy Thomasina Coverly and her tutor Septimus Hodge in the early 19th century, and that of Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, contemporary academics researching the Romantic period of English literature (more or less by rifling through Thomasina's things). Physics, mathematics, poetry, botany!, music, romance, plain ol' nooky, all make an appearance in this exuberant--yet concise--play. Stoppard doesn't beat around the bush and he doesn't wait for you to catch up; if you didn't catch the bit about thermodynamics or chaos theory he's not going to repeat himself, so pay attention! Most of the characters are so brilliant or academic, so immersed in their intellectual pursuits that you'd expect to be bored to tears--but Stoppard makes them engaging, endearing, human and hysterical without turning them into caricatures. There's a big pile of science in it coupled with raw, unanswerable emotion, and it's an amazing combination. I have a copy but you'd have to pry it from my cold dead hand.
Jess
(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.
Ken
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.
Jonfaith
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.
Margaret
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.
Paul
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?
Buddy read with Sunshine Seaspray.
John
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.)