Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...going to provide intellectual pyrotechnics. As the two engage in their battle of wits, however, the drama begins to feel like a play of ideas without enough ideas. Picasso's one-liners aren't so much fireworks as kitchen matches. Martin has recklessly ventured into the country of Tom Stoppard, whose amazing Travesties (which convenes Lenin and James Joyce in Switzerland) may be seen as a rich ancestor of this poor relation...
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...
...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...
Arcadia offers the heartening spectacle of a dramatist who, with commendable industry, has found the unusual but handsome vessel into which most of his obsessions neatly fit. And Stoppard makes it look easy. With Arcadia, he has fabricated a work as simple as a perfect cube and as complex as the physics of a breaking wave. Or make that the physics of the turbulent air in a room where many people are clapping...