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

For the first half, audience members face the actors and scenic designer John McDermott’s divided set – the stage left section depicting Sidley Park’s sprawling lawns, the stage right a modern study. Also at stage left is a fake tortoise that appears in both eras supposedly crawling about. (Is it another of Stoppard’s comment on time’s pace?) Arcadia isn’t exactly a chilly play, but it’s one where the ideas are moving, rather than the people. It’s a doleful comedy about time’s arrow, whose consolatory note is, paradoxically, reprise. "You seem quite sentimental over geometry," Bernard charges Hannah. Arcadia shows you why being sentimental over geometry might not be as silly as it sounds." - Sam Leith, Sunday Times Twenty-one years young, Tom Stoppard's drama of gardening and chaos theory – in which we witness events in a Derbyshire country house taking place more than a century apart – is regularly cited as one of the great plays of the last 50 years, and the playwright's undisputed masterpiece. I wouldn't dream of disagreeing: this is a play of ideas that pits the classical against the romantic, science against poetry, the past against the present. But it has a racing heart, too, exploring what it is that makes us human and our determination to keep dancing even as the darkness gathers and the universe grows cold. 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.” The columnist Johann Hari confidently asserted the other day that Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia is " perhaps the greatest play of its time". A bold claim: suitably brash and impossible to measure. Even so, you can see what he means. Stoppard's wise and yearning play spans the Georgian sublime and the disillusioned days of the last Tory government, spinning ideas about the shape of the universe and the needs of the heart. I can't wait to see it again this week in David Leveaux's new production.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 Hannah becomes obsessed with a mysterious hermit who lived on the property (and, to her great satisfaction, manages to prove Bernard mistaken). Crudup, Esparza, Williams & More to Star in ARCADIA; Begins at Barrymore Theatre on 25 Feb". Broadwayworld.com. 29 December 2010 . Retrieved 13 March 2011. The confusion of who did what (and, in some cases, to whom) work to great comedic and dramatic effect. Labbadia isn’t alone. On the whole, Arcadia’s actors, who are undoubtedly capable of more, are painting with single colors and not bright ones. Wonder is a primary component of the play — it practically runs on the electricity of discovery, the ecstasy of poetry, the distinctively human hunger for beauty. Its other engine is humor: The scenes that take place in 1809 are, for a long time, high comedy in the Oscar Wilde vein, and the play’s modern characters are no slouches in the wit department either. These are people who say things like, “Do not dabble in paradox, Edward. It puts you in danger of fortuitous wit” and — in a single breath — “There are no more than two or three poets of the first rank now living, and I will not shoot one of them dead over a perpendicular poke in a gazebo with a woman whose reputation could not be adequately defended with a platoon of musketry deployed by rota.”

Bernard is trying to prove that Byron was involved in a duel with poet in residence Ezra Chater, explaining Byron's hitherto unexplained two-year absence from England.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. Jim Hunter writes that Arcadia is a relatively realistic play, compared to Stoppard's other works, though the realism is "much enhanced and teased about by the alternation of two eras". [10] The setting and characters are true-to-life, without being archetypal. It is comprehensible: the plot is both logical and probable, following events in a linear fashion. Arcadia's major deviation from realism, of course, is in having two plotlines that are linear and parallel. Thus we see Thomasina deriving her mathematical equations to describe the forms of nature; [11] we later see Val, with his computer, plotting them to produce the image of a leaf. [12] Language [ edit ]

Panofsky, Erwin (2004). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations:Arcadia. quoted in Knowles, Elizabeth (Ed.). Oxford University Press. Thomasina 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. The play's scientific concepts are set forth primarily in the historical scenes, where Thomasina delivers her precocious (or even anachronistic) references to entropy, the deterministic universe and iterated equations in improvised, colloquial terms. [9] In the modern era, Valentine explains the significance of Thomasina's rediscovered notebook with careful detail, reflecting Stoppard's research into his play's scientific materials. [20] [21] In one period -- 1809 to 1812 -- it is the residence of Lord and Lady Croom, young Lady Thomasina Coverly (a young teen) and her tutor, Septimus Hodge, among others. The scene has changed to the present day, apparent from the clothing of the characters on stage. The action of Arcadia shifts from the early nineteenth century to the present day. The setting is still Sidley Park, but there have been changes in the surrounding landscape with time. The modern day characters, Hannah, Chloe, and Bernard, sit in the same room as Thomasina and Septimus. Bernard Nightingale, critic, comes to meet Hannah at the estate. Bernard is looking for information on Ezra Chater. Hannah is looking for information on the Sidley Hermit, whose death she attributes to the breakdown of the Romantic Imagination. Bernard tells Hannah he wants to collaborate with her on a project. Apparently, Bernard's copy of Ezra Chater's The Couch of Eros belonged to Lord Byron and inside the book there are three documents that have led Bernard to believe Lord Byron killed Chater in a duel. Bernard believes that Lord Byron slept with Chater's wife, which led Chater to challenge Lord Byron to a duel die by his hand. Because Lord Byron left the US in 1809, soon after Chater published his last known work, Bernard assumes he was fleeing.A descendent of the 19th-century Coverlys, Chloe Coverly is intelligent and passionate but not quite as brilliant as Thomasina. Valentine Coverly Arcadia features characters from two different time periods: the early 1800s and 1993. 19th Century Characters

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 RepublicCaptain Brice: The brother of Lady Croom (of 1809). He is a sea captain who falls in love with Mrs. Chater. He takes her and her husband to the West Indies at the end of the play. After Mr. Chater's death, Captain Brice marries the widowed Charity Chater. But his is a stylised dialogue, conveying the "look and feel" of the past as perceived by the modern audience. [13] Still, it has sufficient latitude in register to make plain the relationships between the characters. For example, Septimus, after failing to deflect a question from Thomasina with a joke, bluntly explains to his pupil the nature of "carnal embrace" [14] – but this bluntness is far removed from that with which he dismisses Chater's self-deceiving defence of his wife's reputation (which, Septimus says, "could not be adequately defended with a platoon of musketry"). With Lady Croom, in responding to his employer's description of Mrs. Chater as a "harlot", Septimus delicately admits that "her passion is not as fixed" as one might wish. [15] [16]