It is a defect of Gods humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them. Tom Stoppard,Arcadia
In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the five hundred acres inclusive of lake where Capability Browns idealized landscape is about to give way to the Gothic style: everything but vampires, as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard has arrived to uncover the scandal which is said to have taken place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park. Tom Stoppards masterful play takes us back and forth between the centuries and explores the nature of truth and time, the difference between the Classical and the Romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life the attraction, as Hannah says, which Newton left out.
Praise forArcadia: A masterpiece . . . I feel irrationally, impossibly confident that
Arcadiais the finest play written in my lifetime.
New Yorker Theres no doubt about it.
Arcadiais Tom Stoppards richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and . . . emotion. Its like a dream of levitation: youre instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think youre about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow.
New York Times One of the greatest English-language plays of the postwar era, a highbrow whodunit that starts out as a sparkling artificial comedy about extramarital lust, then gradually evolves into a poetic meditation on the philosophico-romantic implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Wall Street Journal Enchanting . . . [lC%
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