Arcadia

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Arcadia is a truly original play, and seduced its audiences and readers by being so new and ingenious. The thrill of discovering revolutionary ideas, for the scientists, poets, historians, landscape gardeners and geniuses who inhabit the play, mirrors the ebullient inventiveness of the thing itself. Tom Stoppard's 1993 play gets richer with each viewing (...) What makes the play both moving and intriguing is that one group of characters seeks to plot the future while the other tries to reconstruct the past." - Michael Billington, The Guardian

Captain 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. In Scene 6, in the past, Septimus enters the house in the early morning. He learns from the butler, Jellaby, that Chater, Mrs. Chater, Brice, and Byron all left early in the morning, because Lady Croom found Mrs. Chater with Byron. The implication is that Lady Croom was having an affair with Byron, and she didn’t like finding another woman with him. Because of the sudden departures, Septimus never had to fight his duel with Chater, which would have been that morning. The day before, Septimus, expecting to die, had left a love letter for Lady Croom, and now she invites him to her sitting room. 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 All admire Stoppard's erudition, wordplay, and clever and intricate plotting, but most voice concern about there being too much intellectual preening on Stoppard's part. Arcadia's plots may leave the play with more characters than it can comfortably handle, but the main ones describe an elegant arabesque worthy of Mandelbrot himself." - Tim Appelo, The Nation

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Chloe's older brother, Valentine is a graduate student studying mathematics. He reluctantly helps Hannah understand Thomasina's genius. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard: Analysis Valentine, the twentieth-century computer scientist and biologist in Arcadia, puts it like this, with excitement and delight: “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is . . . the smallest variation blows prediction apart.” Notably distinguishing themselves in a revival that only skirts the edges of unfortunate hodgepodge are Taylor-Corbett, Szadkowski, Zafir, Labbadia, and the extraordinarily lovely Grogan, who shines throughout with an inner light. Praise be to them – and to Stoppard at an alienating remove.

Rose, Lloyd (20 December 1996). "Stoppard's Coolly Clever 'Arcadia' ". The Washington Post . Retrieved 23 June 2012. In the other -- the present -- an author, Hannah Jarvis, a scholar, Bernard Nightingale, and the scientist (and one of the children of the house) Valentine are the main figures. 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. The story itself is a poignant one, and an entertaining and amusing one as well, as Stoppard mixes elements again and again to reinforce his many points. 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.”Gus Coverly: Valentine and Chloe's younger brother, who has been mute since the age of five. Gus helps to pass several important props from past to present, and helps connect key moments in the play. (Gus and Augustus are played by the same actor.) The language of Arcadia switches between the colloquialisms of early 19th-century England and those of modern England. Stoppard's language reflects his periods, historical and modern, and he uses speech patterns and lexicons in keeping with his characters. 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 ] In 1809, Thomasina Coverly, the daughter of the house, is a precocious teenager with ideas about mathematics, nature, and physics well ahead of her time. She studies with her tutor Septimus Hodge, a friend of Lord Byron (an unseen guest in the house). In the present, writer Hannah Jarvis and literature professor Bernard Nightingale converge on the house: she is investigating a hermit who once lived on the grounds; he is researching a mysterious chapter in the life of Byron. As their studies unfold – with the help of Valentine Coverly, a post-graduate student in mathematical biology – the truth about what happened in Thomasina's time is gradually revealed. 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.