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.)
I LOVE THIS PLAY!!!!!!!!!!! Setting aside musicals (where Les Mis has my heart forever and ever), this is my absolute favorite play. I saw this first, during the current (2011) revival in New York City. I go back and forth whether it was better to see it or read it first, but I think I liked seeing it first. I got to witness it brought to life and glimpsed the big picture before going back and reading the lines and seeing what I missed.Everything takes place in the same room in the same house in Debryshire, England. But there are two plots interweaving 180 years apart. The first (and my personal favorite) takes place in 1809 and centers on 13-year old child genius Thomasina and her womanizing and sarcastic tutor, Septimus. The second is in 1993, which mostly centers on feminist historian Hannah and her patronizing, arrogant fellow historian Bernard, as well as descendants from Thomasina's family line. The things that Thomasina, Septimus and their contemporaries are writing/drawing show up in the 1993 storyline and are (mis-)interpreted by the historians and descendants. There's lots going on here, most of it very clever. It's like an episode of The West Wing where everyone has a quip and can banter smartly without missing a beat. There are also BIG IDEAS about time and destiny and mathematics and romantic v. gothic and science v. humanities and all that jazz.But what makes this great is the characters. I LOVE Thomasina and Septimus. Thomasina is precocious but she's had the typical enclosed childhood of wealthy girls of her time and doesn't quite realize how outlandishly smart she is. Septimus, for all his seductive ways, is an excellent tutor, taking Thomasina seriously and not condescending to her. He's also wonderfully witty and flippant to those he doesn't respect and could easily fit in an Oscar Wilde play. And Stoppard does an amazing job about capturing all the central characters and really making them three-dimensional, without any internal monologuing and voice overs. He also effortlessly intertwines the past/present storylines as well as really making the dialogue between the two ages distinct. We don't talk like people from 1809 and Stoppard never writes like we do. The dialogue from 1809 sounds like it could be from 1809 and the modern dialogue is properly modern. The other thing is that there's no villain. Bernard is certainly aggravating and can be incredibly condescending and reminds me much too much of people I've been trapped in conversations with at college. But he's not The Bad Guy. He's a protagonist and his wild enthusiasm for his subject is rather cute and endearing until he puts his foot in his mouth again. He's kind of the rambunctious puppy that is adorable until he chews up your favorite pair of shoes. But how can you hate a puppy? You have to forgive him and love him all over again. In short: watch it if you can. Read it for sure.
What do You think about Arcadia (1994)?
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.
—Maxwell
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.
—Margaret
It's a great play, and, as with other Stoppard plays, in some ways better to read than to see as there is so much to absorb, and you often want to be able to follow up a reference with additional reading -- something that's hard to do in a theater.
—Evanston Public Library
