Arcadia

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Stoppard’s verbal frivolities are a delight. (...) If the West End is serious about serious plays then this visually stunning and hilariously funny show -- perhaps the wittiest drama written since Wilde was jailed -- should run and run." - Lloyd Evans, The Spectator Arcadia, by intertwining two stories of the past and present of the same family, begs a particular question: what is the meaning of self and how does one know it? The stories are strictly separate plots, settings and worlds; however, there persists the same question of identity for all characters. Which force has more influence over social change: science or emotion? What is more central to a person's ability to connect with others: love or knowledge? Tom Stoppard (1937-) explores these questions and more in his two-act play Arcadia (1993). Alternating between two distinct time periods, Arcadia follows the intellectual discoveries of two young scholars who attempt to uncover the truth of the world around them. Both central female characters are academic geniuses; however, they prioritize science over love and reason over emotion, leaving them oblivious to love and sexuality. Stoppard's Arcadia explores themes such as emotion vs. reason and the mystery of the human heart. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard: Summary

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Emotion versus Intellect Randerson, James (2006) " Levi's memoir beats Darwin to win science book title," The Guardian, 20 October 2006, accessed 30 March 2012.The science may seem heady, but it is really straightforward, and though it does take some effort to follow the many threads it is more than worthwhile. Although he is famously a playwright of ideas, who often says that he starts from the idea rather than from the plot or the characters—or his own life—there are always people mixed up with the ideas. Part of what attracted him to quantum physics was the compelling personal voice of Richard Feynman. When he heard that Feynman had died, in 1988, just after Hapgood was launched, he said: “I don’t think I’ve ever read [an obituary] which caused me such a stab of grief as I felt on reading of the death of an American physicist whom I had never met and whose work was way out of the reach of my understanding.” He knew that it was, fundamentally, “grief for myself”: he had wanted to send him Hapgood as “an object of tribute.” But, more than that, he had wanted Feynman to know that he had tried to cross the “great divide in our culture” between science and art. Reading Feynman had confirmed his view that “science and art are more like each other than unlike . . . [they] are not just like each other, they sometimes seem to be each other.” He called him “an aristocrat in science and a democrat in almost everything else.” The cunning beauty and delight of Arcadia is how its ingredients—human, romantic, intellectual, scientific—are meshed together to make a perfect whole. The 2011 Broadway staging met with a mixed reception. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called the production "a half-terrific revival of Mr. Stoppard's entirely terrific Arcadia", noting that "several central roles are slightly miscast", and "some of the performances from the Anglo-American cast are pitched to the point of incoherence." [54] Similar concerns were raised by critics from the New York magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, Time Out New York and Bloomberg News. [55] Awards and nominations [ edit ] Awards Arcadia is a highly literate, ingenious and intelligent theatrical entertainment, probably Stoppard's most accomplished play. But while one must respect the playwright's wit and erudition, it strikes me as the work of a brilliant impersonator rather than a dramatist with his own authentic voice. The play smells more of the lamp than of the musk of human experience." - Robert Brustein, The New Republic

Tom Stoppard's most brilliant and brainy play (...) is a literary puzzle interweaving so many themes (not to mention love affairs) that it threatens to overwhelm the ordinary brain" - Emma John, The Observer Chloe's older brother, Valentine is a graduate student studying mathematics. He reluctantly helps Hannah understand Thomasina's genius. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard: AnalysisThomasina and Chloe are another pair. The "action of bodies in heat" argued for by Thomasina manifests in Chloe's complete concern with the heat and seduction of Bernard. Like Thomasina's discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, Chloe adds her own idea to the mix: sex is the ultimate argument against determinism. Chloe believes that the randomness of sexual attraction keeps the world from a deterministic end. Like her counterpart, Thomasina, Chloe asks if she is the "first person to think of this." Valentine, like Septimus, replies to her enthusiasm with a probable "yes." The ultimate proof to the random nature of bodies in heat exists in Thomasina's generation with the character of Mrs. Chater—a woman obsessed with making heat with anyone at anytime. Chloe seems to know the proof of her idea by her own actions and attraction to the foppish scholar, Bernard. The second law of thermodynamics, while possibly not fully understood by either girl, is simultaneously an answer and a dilemma to the question of self for the girls;one cannot predict the random actions of people or themselves. The death of Thomasina by fire is certainly symbolic of this truth. Septimus Hodge: Thomasina's tutor, and the academic colleague and friend of Lord Byron (an unseen but important character). While teaching Thomasina, he works on his own research and has affairs with the older women of the house. When Thomasina is older, he falls in love with her; after her death, he becomes the "hermit of Sidley Park", working on her theories until his own death. Eventually a waltz starts, and Septimus dances with Thomasina, revealing that their relationship is increasingly complicated by hints of romance. Gus (Valentine and Chloe's younger brother, who has been silent for the entire play) hands another of Thomasina's drawings to a surprised Hannah. It depicts Septimus and the tortoise, confirming her suspicion that the hermit, who had a tortoise called Plautus, was Septimus. After Thomasina's tragic death, he apparently became a hermit. Accepting her challenge to the laws of the universe as propounded by Newton, he worked for the rest of his life to apply "honest English algebra" to the question of the universe's future. In Scene 5, Bernard begins to read his paper about Chater and Byron to the family. The siblings and Hannah interrupt many times, and Valentine points out that Bernard didn’t include the statistical data that go against his hypothesis. Bernard, offended by the challenge to his big idea, makes an impassioned case that poetry is more important than science, and Valentine storms out. Bernard invites Hannah to London “for sex,” but she dismisses the idea. Bernard leaves, and Hannah reads Valentine some new information from a 19th-century article about the hermit—the hermit was obsessed with mathematical ideas about the fate of the universe which sound suspiciously like Thomasina’s.

Hunter, Jim (2000). "Arcadia". Tom Stoppard. Faber Critical Guides. London: Faber. p.155. ISBN 0-571-19782-5. To listen to Labbadia deliver this speech, you’d think Valentine means “irritated” when he says “happy.” As the anxious, aspiring Cambridge postgrad, Labbadia glowers and snaps and trudges around in a dirty bathrobe, playing a first-person shooter on a handheld gaming console and sullenly bouncing a tennis ball off the wall. You imagine him sulking in a basement surrounded by pizza boxes and unwashed novelty T-shirts. It’s not unusual to interpret Valentine as neurodivergent, and when it comes to Labbadia’s standoffishness, that may be the intention here — but that should make no difference in the character’s ability to feel wonder, or, really, anything apart from annoyance. The next scene is set in the same location in the 20th century. Romantic scholar Hannah Jarvis is researching Sidley Park and its mysterious hermit. She is joined by Bernard Nightingale, an older scholar and critic, who pretends to be a fan of Chater's poetry in the hopes that Hannah will share her research. Consciously echoed phrases, across the time frames, help to unify the play. For example, Chloe asks Valentine if "the future is all programmed like a computer", and whether she is the first to think that theory discredited "because of sex". [22] Thomasina has been there before: "If you could stop every atom in its position and direction ... you could write the formula for all the future," she tells Septimus, then adds, "Am I the first person to have thought of this?" [23] The difference is significant: Chloe's intuitive version allows for the effects of chaos, illustrating Stoppard's theme of the interdependence of science and art, and between professional and amateur thinking. [24] Title [ edit ] The title Arcadia alludes to a pastoral ideal. Et in Arcadia ego is most known as the title of this painting by Nicolas Poussin, also known as Les bergers d'Arcadie ("The Arcadian Shepherds") The 2009 London revival prompted more critics to laud the play as "Stoppard's finest work". [51] Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian that the play "gets richer with each viewing. ... [T]here is poetry and passion behind the mathematics and metaphysics." [52] Johann Hari of The Independent speculated that Arcadia would be recognised "as the greatest play of its time". [53]

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Lady Croom: Thomasina's mother. She rules the Coverly estate with an iron fist, but flirts with Septimus and other gentlemen throughout the play. A second Lady Croom, the mother of Valentine, Chloe, and Gus in the modern half of the play, never appears on stage. It’s how you look at population changes in biology. Goldfish in a pond, say. This year there are x goldfish. Next year there’ll be y goldfish. Some get born, some get eaten by herons. Nature manipulates the x and turns it into y. Then y goldfish is your starting population for the following year . . . Your value for y becomes your next value for x. While Arcadia draws its veracity from historical facts, which the author manipulates in a variety of ways, they're as intellectually digestible as pork stuffing. And about as moving. (...) In Arcadia, where there is no emotional truth at stake because there are no true charaacters, it is the playwright himself who tries to transmit directly to the bemused spectator. (...) (W)hile desire runs rampant through Arcadia, there is no passion; people screw, but less to connect than to generate even more witty material." - Hilton Als, The New Yorker

As usual, this was not his only idea. Arcadia is about knowledge, sex and love, death and pastoral, Englishness and poetry, biography and history. Not to mention chaos mathematics, iterated algorithms, Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is a play with one set, set in two time zones. It is a comedy with a tragedy inside it. And it is a quest story, which he kept reminding himself, in his notes, to keep in focus: “ Simple narrative must be prime. The poet—the critic—the duel—the Suitor—the Garden—the Waltz. The searcher—the quest—the discovery—(and being wrong)—.” In Arcadia, time is the subject: what is happening to it; how we live in it, not knowing our fates; whether those things which have become “lost to view will have their time again.” In December 1996, the first major US regional production was mounted at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. [41] The play seems to position the two in stark opposition to one another. If people give in to their emotions and passions, they neglect their intellectual ability and rationality. For academics like Thomasina and Hannah, this means putting aside romance to focus entirely on education. Both women earn recognition for being incredibly intelligent, but this comes at the cost of emotional connection and potential happiness. It isn't until the end of the play that Hannah dances with Gus and realizes emotion and reason don't have to be separate but could work in tandem to bring balance and happiness to life.Edwards, Paul (2001). "Science in Hapgood and Arcadia". In Kelly, Katherine E. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cambridge University Press. p.181. ISBN 978-0-521-64178-4. Fleming 2008, p.1"Tom Stoppard has ranked as one of the most significant contemporary playwrights…many critics cite Arcadia as [his] finest play." Arcadia was voted onto the shortlist for the Royal Institution award for "the best science book ever written". The winner, announced on 19 October 2006, was The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. [56] In revealing and celebrating the wanting in all of us, Arcadia offers as thrilling and fulfilling a theatergoing experience as you'll likely have this season." - Elysa Gardner, USA Today