Word: arcadia
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Were it not so faithful to its own artistic designs, you might suppose Tom Stoppard had written Arcadia expressly to refute his critics. Though having led something of a charmed professional life (he has been internationally acclaimed since his first produced play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in 1967), the Czechoslovak-born playwright has not been spared his detractors, particularly in his adopted England...
...been told Stoppard has no real subject but his own ingenuity. But with Arcadia he has taken on, dazzlingly, an expansive slew of topics: a young girl's dawning sexuality, the birth of Romanticism, modern academia, post-Newtonian physics. We've heard he fails to understand women or to create good female characters. But in Thomasina Coverly, a 13-year-old mathematical genius fated to die before her 17th birthday, he has forged a female role any young actress would pine for. We've heard that he is all brain and no heart, and yet by Arcadia's final...
...often happens with his plays, Arcadia--which opened on Broadway last week--is more complicated in the summarizing than in the performing; the staging clarifies a great deal. The action unfolds in a grand English country house. The scenes alternate between a few hectic days in April 1809 when a number of guests, including--perhaps--Lord Byron, have come for a visit, and the present day when the house is invaded by, among others, a pair of literary historians who turn out to be Byron scholars (Blair Brown, Victor Garber...
...Arcadia provides a cautionary fable for the historian, it is also a sort of trans-century canticle whose themes resound through the decades in transmuted, enriched forms. Stoppard has devised the perfect setting for his verbal ambiguity and punning, as when he plays on the phrase "the action of bodies in heat." To Thomasina and her tutor Septimus Hodge, the words suggest the entropic universe of the second law of thermodynamics and the collapse of classical mathematics. But to Chloe Coverly, a distant descendant of Thomasina, those bodies are human and the heat is sexual. Words, no less than...
Just how rich and varied that middle range can be is shown by a sampling of recent openings in London. The best of the lot: Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard, whose brilliant 1993 Arcadia is still going strong in London (and opens on Broadway next week). Like Arcadia, Indian Ink interweaves two time periods and settings, in this case present-day England and 1930 India. Also like its companion piece, the new play is framed as a quest by a careerist academic who is loaded with data but doesn't have a clue. Here it's an American scholar researching...